engleski

Postcolonial Theory in Practice: Essays of James Joyce and Edward Said

This paper examines the critical writings of James Joyce in light of postcolonial theory, in particular his essays delivered also as public lectures in Trieste: the first devoted to Irish political and cultural history, the second to Mangan and the third to the Irish literary renaissance, as well as his other non-fictional writings, some of them first published in Italian newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera in the time when irredentist movement in Italy was on the rise. Joyce's critical writings have often been analysed either in relation to his biography or in relation to his own creative writing. In my paper I will approach his non-fictional writing in its own right and analyse it as an example of cultural criticism arguing that many concepts set forth in postcolonial theory in the 1970ties are already embedded in his discursive practice. Taking into account his statement that «Our civilization is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled…» (Joyce, CW, p.165) I will illustrate the way Joyce envisages culture as a process and investigate his representation of the dynamics of this process structured around the tensions between constitutive and often conflicting forces. His dealing with the condition of imperialism, colonial rule, race, nation, eurocentrisim, exile, the enactment of the «othering process» and the ambiguity of the concept of «the west» as a spatial and ideological construction will be compared and contrasted with the way these concepts are elaborated in Edward Said's seminal essays relevant to postcolonialism, in particular those collected in Culture and Imperialism (e.g. Yeats and decolonisation, etc.). The aim of my paper is to illustrate how similar ideas and concerns relevant to postcolonial theory energized the writings of both these writers living in different historical periods and cultural spaces investigating the way they are structured in their essays and arguing that postcolonial condition in them is not only depicted but also shaped as discursive practice.

James Joyce; Edward Said; postcolonialism

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