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List of contents
Preface: Why Joyce? Why Heresy? Why Now?
Introduction: Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Imagination
Chapter 1: Five Moments of Schism: A Selective History of Heresy
Chapter 2: Reversals of History: From the First Heretics to James Joyce and Back Again
Chapter 3: Arius, Heretical Christology, and the Anxiety of Artistic Creation
Chapter 4: Ulysses, Medieval Heresy, and the Eucharist: Fragmented Narratives of Doubt
Chapter 5: Alternative Reformations: The Word, Iconoclasm, and Finnegans Wake
Chapter 6: Heretical Reading Strategies: The Book of Mormon and Finnegans Wake
Epilogue: Writing and the Practice of Heresy: From Wake Reading Groups to Church Graffiti
About the author
Gregory Erickson is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, USA. He is co-editor of Reading Heresy: Religion and Dissent in Literature and Art (2018), co-author of Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred (2008), and author of The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (2007).
Summary
Organized by heretical movements and texts from the Gnostic Gospels to The Book of Mormon, this book uses the work of James Joyce – particularly Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake – as a prism to explore how the history of Christian heresy remains part of how we read, write, and think about books today.
Erickson argues that the study of classical, medieval, and modern debates over heresy and orthodoxy provide new ways of understanding modernist literature and literary theory. Using Joyce’s works as a springboard to explore different perspectives and intersections of 20th century literature and the modern literary and religious imagination, this book gives us new insights into how our modern and “secular” reading practices unintentionally reflect how we understand our religious histories.
Foreword
This book uses Joyce’s work—especially Ulysses and Finnegans Wake - to examine how the history of Christian heresy remains a part of how we read, write, and think about bodies, books, language, time, and literature.
