The English Seminar in collaboration with
the Department of Inclusion and Access to Learning
present
Joyce and Race
Prof. Len Platt
Tuesday 10 May
18:00hrs
Faculty of Arts Library
Abstract
Race is a familiar enough concern of Joyce studies, especially since Vincent Cheng’s landmark reading, Joyce, Race and Empire (1995). Most typically it figures in the context of Irish history and postcolonial critical traditions. Here race is often understood in terms of the binary where the imperial Self becomes conditioned against the colonial Other and vice versa. In this framework the Joyce oeuvre is often formulated as a vigorous and developing engagement around colonial identities. Dubliners becomes a young man’s anatomizing of a colonial subject too conditioned or weak to be extricated from the ‘native’ condition, but also exoticized in some ways as the romantic Other. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a more mature and nuanced representation of Irish identity. Here Joyce’s prototype artist might declare his resistance to both nation and state, but he proclaims the end of his youth with a determination ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.’ With this apparent contradiction, the question of what it means to be ‘Irish’ becomes considerably problematized. This talk by Len Platt a leading Joyce scholar, continues the debate of the problematics of race into the later fictions, both master texts of modernism and postmodernism — Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
Bio-note
Len Platt is Professor of Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths. He was appointed Head of Goldsmiths Learning and Enhancement Unit in July 2011. He has written widely on modern literary culture, especially on the works of James Joyce and on ‘popular culture’ in various genres and technological forms. His particular interest is in the politics of texts and the ways culture performs in politically strategic ways.