Ulysses: A Reproduction of the 1922 First Edition

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Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus

Book Description

Regarded today as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, Ulysses remained banned in the United States until 1933. Drawing upon a complex network of symbolic parallels from mythology, history, and literature, the novel employs experimental narrative techniques to chronicle an ordinary day in the lives of three Dubliners.

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The 1934 text, as corrected and reset in 1961. Ulysses is one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. It was not easy to find a publisher in America willing to take it on, and when Jane Jeap and Margaret Anderson started printing extracts from the book their literary magazine The Little Review in 1918, they were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity. They were fined $100, and even The New York Times expressed satisfaction with their conviction. Ulysses was not published in book form until 1922, when another American woman, Sylvia Beach, published it in Paris for her Shakespeare & Company. Ulysses was not available legally in any English-speaking country until 1934, when Random House successfully defended Joyce against obscenity charges and published it in the Modern Library. This edition follows the complete and unabridged text as corrected and reset in 1961. Judge John Woolsey's decision lifting the ban against Ulysses is reprinted, along with a letter from Joyce to Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House, and the original foreword to the book by Morris L. Ernst, who defended Ulysses during the trial.

Customer Reviews:

Ulysses, great or not ?.......2007-09-20

Probably every avid reader feels compelled at some time in life to read "Ulysses", especially as it was voted the best work of fiction of the 20th century at the turn of this millenium.

The style of writing throughout the book is usually referred to as "stream of consciousness". This method has been subsequently employed in other works such as "To The Lighthouse" and "The sound and the Fury". However, in my opinion, these latter two works used the style much more succesfully than Joyce.

If you are currently reading "Ulysses" at the moment, expect a very patchy book. The second half is , in general, better than the first half, with the two penultimate chapters "Cabman's shelter" and "Ithaca" standing out from the rest. After that, the description of birth in "Oxen in the sun" is also excellent , as is the part dsecribing Paddy Dignam's funeral early in the book. As to the rest of the book, I believe there is little to recommend it.

Opinion tends to be polarized about "Ulysses" . Its severest critics suggest that it is only praised by those who are scared to be criticized for not understanding the book, a sort of "emperor's new clothes" scenario. There is, however, more than a grain of truth in this opinion. It does seem incredible that a book with so much "padding" could be so highly thought of. It might have made a very good book of around 200 pages, but one does have the sensation that Joyce is taking his readers for a ride in many parts. ( Of course, his ultimate send up of his readers was "Finnegan's Wake"! ). Furthermore, the much lauded sense of humour is overblown. At best, this is a mildly amusing book with one or two laugh out loud lines. To label it as "very funny" is pretentiousness itself. Most of the humour is also of the "toilet" variety.

On the positive side, there are some interesting passages as mentioned above. However, the main interest lies in seeing this new attempt at a style of writing , and to try to fathom out why this book has become the "darling" of the ( maybe "so-called" ) intellectuals. If you want to see a better example of joyce's talents, try "Potrait Of The Artist As A Young Man", or even "The Dubliners".

ULYSSES is Joyce's Retelling of the Homerian Epic . Massive, Maddening, Enigmatic and Priceless.......2007-09-13

James Joyce (1882-1941) was a tormented Roman Catholic who forsook his faith, picked up his pen and wrote the great novel "Ulysses" based on the epic poem "The Odyssey" by Homer. It is impossible to explain Ulysses or give it an adequate review in the short space alloted this reviewer. Howwver, I would offer the following thoughts for those brave souls eager to enter the labyrinthal complexities of a genius's mind:
Joyce tells the story of one day in the life of the people of Dublin, Ireland on June 16, 1904 (the day he first met his wife Nora Baracle). As he does so in eighteen chapters linked with similar episodes in "The Odyssey." During the day (about 900 pages) we follow the two chief characters on their peregrinations and adventures. Those characters are:
Stephen Dedalus-Named for the Greek mytholgical figure Dedalus who builds wings to fly in the sky; his son Icarus flies too close to the sun and perishes while Dedalus lands in Sicily. Stephen was the chief character in Joyce's "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." He is tormented by his failure to pray at his dying mother's bedside; tormented by the Roman Catholic Church's burden of guilt laid upon his soul. Stephen is an aspiring author. He is ambivalent in his feelings toward his native Ireland. As the novel begins he is living in the English built castle
The Martello Tower along with his friend Buck Mulligan and an Englishman named Haines. Stephen is a teacher who is supervised by the horrible Deasy a West Englishman who in an Orange Protestant. Deasy is a false Nestor to the callow Stephen. Stephen is an intellectual with biographical correspondence to the author James Joyce.
Leopold Bloom-A 38 year old advertising man who is married to the sensuous Molly. Bloom is a middlebrow who roams the streets of Dublin plying his advertising career engaging in arguments, dreaming about a sexy young thing on the beach and saving Stephen from trouble in the famous Nighttime section of the book. Leopold does not practice his Judaism. His father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant. The novel ends with Bloom returning home to his unfaithful wife Molly just as Odysseus returned home to his faithful wife Penelope in the Homeric epic. Bloomsday is celebrated worldwide on Feb. 2 each year (the date of Joyce's birth in 1882).
c. Molly Bloom-Her nearly fifty pages of stream of consciousness prose was until recently the longest sentence in the English language. She is a coarse, bawdy, serially cheating wife to Bloom.
I do not claim to understand everything going on in Ulysses. Joyce said it would take the professors and critics centuries to explore its rich minefield of literary allusions, jokes, and analysis of the human condition. Ulysses has been banned and blasted by literary critics as the same time it has been praised. You may find out yourself by giving it a close reading with a good commentary handy. Joyce plums the depths of the human mind. He is a great Irish genius whose work demands study.

A REAL FAILURE AS A NOVEL .......2007-08-03

As a devout modernist, I put off the pleasure of reading this book for years. I wanted to have the time and leisure to give it proper attention. I had taken a seminar with Anthony Burgess on ULYSSES at CCNY in the early seventies. We did a close reading of the Nighttown chapter and were supposed to read the rest of the novel on our own. I never did. But Burgess' enthusiasm was impressive and though I wasn't entirely convinced, I was certainly intrigued. In earlier years I had read DUBLINERS and PORTRAIT and even some of FINNEGANS WAKE and was especially impressed by Joyce's mastery of language and the poetic quality of his prose.

An early retirement offer finally had me reading the "GREATEST NOVEL OF THE 20th CENTURY" last month in Riverside Park. Some nice cigars added to the mix.

The first few chapters were stunning. The powers of description, the playfulness and musicality of language, the wit and intelligence of Stephen and Buck were a delight. I was obviously in the hands of a master. Shakespeare even came to mind.

But then something happened. The humanity and poetry seemed to drain out of the thing as we were treated to yet another chapter of theoretical "experimentation in narrative technique". The idea of writing a novel, each chapter of which is written in a parodistic or borrowed style seems to me a doomed one. (And more postmodernist than modernist). Apparently even Ezra Pound objected. I found myself asking, "Couldn't Joyce have found his own voice and style to narrate this section?" An entire narrative chapter in the question and answer form of a Catholic Catechism seems affected at first. After thirty pages it is deadly and even embarrassing. And then another in the style of a men's sporting magazine, and then another in the style of a women's magazine? What's the point? (Other than showing off?) And the Freudian/Surrealist kitsch of the endless Nighttown chapter was downright infantile. Talk about dated! This is novel writing from the outside in. First you have an "experimental" concept and then you fit in some narrative stuff. It's no wonder academics use this book as major fodder. It seems to be written with them in mind.

Likewise the useless tie ins with Homer's ODYSSEY. One can't help thinking of them as a desperate attempt to add structure, incident and theme to a book fairly bereft of them. Not to mention adding a bit of literary pedigree to offset the "obscenity".

Which brings me to my last point. The fancy smorgasbord of styles cannot disguise that as a novel, ULYSSES is sorely lacking. All the criteria by which we judge a novel - character depth and development, involving narrative, thematic focus, depth of feeling etc., seem totally absent. Basically what we have here is a brief Balzacian "realist" sketch, padded out and styled-up beyond belief.

Now this is really a minority opinion: not only is ULYSSES a failure, but the reason I think it is a failure is that it is a transitional work. Joyce was obviously bored with novelistic narrative but still felt obliged to accommodate. With FINNEGANS WAKE, he hit stride and finally found his métier - a book as a place to play with language and psyche for his own pleasure, without regard for traditional novelistics.

A NOTE ON EDITIONS: The huge academic controversy about which edition of ULYSSES is "authentic" or "correct" is, as one might expect, much ado about very little. Serious textual issues are minimal. Most of the typos in the 1922 edition were corrected in 1960/1 by the editors of the Modern Library in consultation with Richard Ellmann. That text was also used for the Bodley Head and current Everyman editions. Gabler later went overboard, making some highly questionable decisions. His edition is also difficult to read due to small print, layout, line-numbering etc. Danis Rose's edition went even further and "corrected" Joyce's compound words etc. - a disgrace.

I ended up reading an online version edited by Jorn Barger - a very sensible amalgam of the best work of previous editors. It took some time and expense to print out, but it was definitely worth it.

Classic of Modern Literature.......2007-07-23

While this text is undoubtedly one of the most difficult that I have read, the sheer skill at manipulating language that Joyce demonstrates is remarkable. The result is a novel that offers a most intimate study into the human method of thinking.

Not for the faint of heart, however, because this is a text that requires dedication, as the games that Joyce plays with language and the thinking of his characters often obfuscates the meaning.

Well, it's a classic, it once earned deserved praise as new & original but..........2007-07-10

Many scenes stick in one's mind forever, for example when Leopold Bloom releases his bowels or when the coffin falls on the road. I finally came to understand the stream-of-consciousness technique and realized it's not Joyce's stream we're wading in but the carefully reproduced stream of the character's consciousness. I found this particularly effective and fun reading of Stephen Dedalus's morning at school. Other scenes like Molly Bloom's grand finale are simply beautiful and literally breathless, especially if you take punctuation as a breathing signal.

And I'm especially glad to read it now that I live in Dublin. I've lived in Ringsend three months, I've visited a friend in Mullingar, and I've shopped at Buckley's butcher shop, all of which are mentioned in Ulysses. I even bought my copy of the book at the Martello tower featured at the start of the novel.

But overall, one feels Ulysses is somewhat contrived. Crucify this humble critic if you will, but reproducing the structure of the Odyssey is a clever but artificial way of bringing epic grandeur to what is nothing more than a very ordinary day. Why go through all that trouble? I do agree with the lesson but find it rather long winded. In painting, a still life by Chardin is as realistic as an imperial coronation scene by David, but with much less fuss.

And then there are the inside jokes. References to Walt Whitman and to Edgar Allen Poe (which I got only because I remembered Tom Hanks reciting Poe's "To Helen" in The Ladykillers) and other writers abound. Shouldn't a great work stand on its own, at least where its intended audience is concerned? Ulysses fails utterly in this respect unless we restrict the audience to academics.

Vincent Poirier, Dublin

Book Description

With friends like Hina's, who needs enemies? When Emi learns of Hina's wealthy background, she hatches a dastardly plot to kidnap her and Asou-sensei. Fortunately Hina's teacher has a few tricks up his sleeve to foil Emi's sinister scheme, but not without a price. Secrets about Asou-sensei's past are revealed, forcing Hina to question why she was ever hot for teacher. But when Asou-sensei contemplates early retirement from the school, will Hina ever become the teacher's pet? Or will Asou simply say sayonara after the final school bell rings?

Customer Reviews:

Not what I expected, but then again, it was........2007-07-06

I admit, I wanted a different ending than what CLAMP gave, but if they had done it the way I, and probably others had wanted it, the story would not have been CLAMP's. CLAMP continually surprises me with its wonderfully artistic endings that I never expect.

Suki ended well in my opinion. It answered all the questions asked in the previous two volumes. While I still had issues with Hina's friend Emi, I suppose it did indeed end the way it was intended to end by CLAMP, I was happy with Hina and Asou-sensei. He finally smiles and it is because of Hina, so in my opinion, this was the best ending they could have done. Buy this series, it's wonderfully cute, and is one of the sweetest stories CLAMP has ever created.

Another wonderful Clamp series comes to a close.......2004-06-30

I won't say much other than that is a wonderful ending to a wonderful series. It delivers exactly what we readers want in perfect Clamp style and leaves us wondering what will happen after we close the book. It's not quite like other Clamp endings, but I suppose it's similiar. I highly advise checking it out for yourself! You won't be dissappointed!

We know a lot now..........2004-06-25

After volume One and Two we now know that Hinata Asahi, because of her rich father, has been kidnapped many times. We know that she has somehow stayed happy, even after she decided that living alone was better. She didn't want anybody else getting hurt if somebody kidnapped her again. And by the third volume you SHOULD know why Shiro Asou is there.
But can you guess who is going to be her next kidnapper? Will Shiro be able to protect her and will Hinata WANT his protection when he could hurt? And what happens when SHE figures out that he's just doing a job for her father? If she loves him because he does everything she loves, what happens when she understands that he did it to get close to her, to better protect her?
And can he love her back?

DON'T BUY THIS!!!!.......2004-06-23

This is horrible, I can't believe that CLAMP wrote this the ending is horrible, it's even worse than the Chobits ending, and I sure hope that X/1999 dosen't end like this. I'm just forewarning all of you Suki fans out there, the other two books are great but this one SUCKS!!!!! DO NOT BUY!!!!!!

Amazon.com

When an anthology is titled Women Writing Science Fiction as Men, readers expect either stories on the cutting edge of feminist/gender theory, or a tribute to the late James Tiptree, Jr., the female author everyone thought was male. However, the anthology meets neither expectation. It has a different mandate.

In his introduction, editor Mike Resnick states, "there is a difference in writing about a male and writing as a male." The all-female contributors were charged to write "as a male," with "each story...told in the first person of a man, and...if changing the narrator from Victor to Victoria invalidated the story we didn't want it." However, the anthology doesn't follow two-thirds of its own rules. Neither sex "change" nor biosex has had a discernable effect. The narrators tend to hold "traditionally male" jobs like astronaut, cop, soldier, engineer, superspy, and messiah, but females in these roles are hardly unusual (except messiah, a role also rare for males, and superspy, a role that doesn't exist in reality). Further, four of these sixteen original stories present Victors that cannot readily be turned into Victorias: a rapist, a James Bond parody, and two fellows fighting near-future paternity suits. Additionally, one story is narrated by a Victoria!

The contributors include some big names and hot up-and-comers, among them Kay Kenyon, Mercedes Lackey, Susan R. Matthews, Terry McGarry, Severna Park, Laura Resnick, Jennifer Roberson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Karen E. Taylor, and singer-songwriter Janis Ian. --Cynthia Ward

Book Description

They're not men. (But that won't stop them from writing SF like men.) That's the premise of this highly original collection of new short stories-written from the viewpoint of the opposite sex.

Customer Reviews:

Some interesting stories, but unsuccessful in its own terms........2006-07-25

In his introduction, Mike Resnick set up two rules:

1. The story was to be narrated in the first person by a male character;
2. The story would be unworkable if the main character were changed into a woman;

The goal was for the female authors to write like a man, i.e., getting into the mindset of a man.

I think that only five of the sixteen stories actually succeeded. Of these five, I liked "All My Children" by Leslie What, and Leah A. Zeldes grotesquely funny "Big" the best. I thought that "Homecoming" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and "Jesus Freaks" by Jennifer Roberson were promising, but fell flat in the end. I think that other people may like them; in particular I know few people who are bothered by the things that I didn't like in the latter.

Severna Parks' "Call for Submissions" failed the most objective rule: it is narrated by a woman. Although I loved Laura Resnick's "Licensed to Reclaim", I think that I would have assumed that it was written by a woman, unless it was written for the companion anthology, Men Writing Science Fiction as Women. I do think that it captures a certain male mindset, but from a woman's point of view. There are a couple more that are iffy in that regard.

As to requiring a male narrator, I am reminded that someone once remarked that there are only two gender-specific jobs: wet-nurse and sperm donor. I gather that most of these authors wouldn't agree. I think that ten or possibly eleven of the stories could have had a female narrator. In some cases, making the main character female would have required that the spouse be male, or in other cases, that they be a lesbian couple, but I consider that minor. The main characters fill roles that were traditionally male, but could certainly be held by a woman. Increasing the confusion, they often have a female partner or colleague, making it clear that they could have been women. Still, although I don't think they satisfied the criteria, I enjoyed "Better than Ants" by Barbara Galler-Smith; "A Good Idea at the Time" by Karen E. Taylor; "Blackbird, Fly!" by Linda J. Dunn. I thought that "Maxwell's Law" by Adrienne Gormley was fun, but the ending was a little flat; and "Diving After Reflected Woman" by Terry M. McGarry was very interesting if not exactly enjoyable.

I would say that in most cases, the authors do succeed in "writing like men" in that I wouldn't have been able to guess from the story that it was by a woman. Although this may seen odd in view of my coming remarks, almost all the authors write quite well in a technical wordsmith sort of way: they use words well, but I found most of the stories unsatisfying.

Normally, I don't like all the works in an anthology, and I don't really see that as a problem since authors are likely to be a diverse group. I won't say that these were bad stories in any cosmic sense: other people may like them just fine. What I found odd is that I usually didn't like the stories for the same reason: what one might call the "huh?" factor.

Janis Ian's story "Prayerville" is well written, poetic, and I thought was going to be moving. At one point a character says to the narrator: "'Now you understand, yes?' Yes, I understand." Well, I don't. I get the theme, but the story seems full of holes. It's not that I don't understand the "Joes", they're aliens after all, and an essential part of the story is the difficulty that humans have understanding them. The problem is that I can't make sense of the human characters. Why was the narrator human, never mind male or female? What about the children? After this epiphany, why does he gets on the bus like nothing happened? The answer to the first question is of course that the author wanted a character to whom explanations would need to be made - if you have to explain it, it didn't work.

It was the same with many of the other stories: I felt there was too much left out, or the stories simply didn't have a satisfying ending. This of course, is quite subjective, so I am sure that many people will love stories I found disappointing.

To sum it up, there are some good stories here, it's a worthwhile anthology for people who like science fiction short stories. I don't think it succeeded at its stated goal, however.

Amazing debut.......2003-06-24

Janis Ian has got to be one of the most underrated voices in the world today. From her earliest record ("Society's Child, written and recorded at age 14) to her seminal "At Seventeen", Ian has chronicled our times with a verve and bravery that sometimes border on desperation.
Her contribution to this anthology, "Prayerville", is admittedly her first story. The first story she ever wrote alone?! Given that, it is stunning. Borrowing a leaf from Tennessee Williams, she begins the story with "I took the Lone Star from base down Hope Highway, where I switched to a local." She goes on to describe, in the best tradition, a true tragedy - one where both sides are right, and both sides are wrong... and there is no easy solution.
If for no other reason, this book is worth purchasing to see Ian's first real entry into published prose.

Good premise for this fine anthology.......2003-06-13

The title misled this reviewer and will probably do likewise for many readers who will believe that the collection consists of works by female authors using male pseudonyms. Instead, women with no gender disguises write the tales, but the lead character is supposed to be a man providing a male's first person narrative.

That aside, the anthology is fun to read though there is little gender bending in most of the stories (no pregnant Mork from Ork). In fact the jobs, with one Holy exception, tilt in percentage towards the male, but women hold many of them in real life too. Fans will enjoy the stories as solid science fiction that run much of the gamut, but the gimmick fails dismally to bring out any unique revelations.

Book Description

First came Women Writing Science Fiction as Men, which was a homage to the early days of the science fiction genre, when it was a given that the writers and their readers were men and any woman writing science fiction had to hide her true identity. Now, in this all-new collection of nineteen stories by top male writers, the men are getting a chance to see if they can meet the challenge of successfully writing as women.

Stories by Barry N. Malzberg, Robert J. Sawyer, Ralph Roberts, Robert Sheckley, Jack Dann, David Gerrold, Frank M. Robinson, Dean Wesley Smith, and others

Customer Reviews:

more than 50% are great stories for the criteria.......2004-06-12

This collection had two criteria: first person story as a woman and putting a male character in her place wouldn't work. By and large the 19 stories do that. But this is where fiction reviews are tricky because we all have different tastes. I loved 12 of the stories -- the characters were believeble but most importantly I wanted to find out what happened to them. Yes, a lot of them had to do with motherhood or lack thereof or sexism -- sadly both are factors in a woman's life, one by biology (perhaps not always) and one by society still. It would have been nice to see a story where that wasnt't the case but we are all trapped by our own experiences.

Not a bad anthology.......2004-04-04

This novel appealed to me, partly because I wanted to see how men would write from a woman's position, but mostly because I was in the mood to read good science fiction short stories. As stories go they're not bad, although I did expect more.

There's a wide variety of stories in this book. The first one opens up with a woman who's lover wants to have a child, but lacks a uterus due to an in-body espresso machine. On the other end of the spectrum you have Phil, who's undergone a procedure to become Phillpa, and his mental state isn't that great. You have a story about Marie, the computer AI for a building, and how she came into being. There's a young girls coming of age kind of story mixed in with a archeological dig, and a fairy's first days as a living creature.

Several of the stories center around motherhood: a woman who finds herself pregnant obtains an illegal gene bomb to force a doctor into making her child smart, another is about a young woman who agrees to become a breeder for an alien race that came down and conquered humans. A third has a mother searching for the daughter that was taken from her 12 years before, and another deals with mind travel, where a woman's unborn child mind travels back in time to ensure they are concieved.

Overall there's a pretty wide variety of stories in this anthology, and there's bound to be something for everyone. Generally the female characters are pretty beleivable, with few exceptions you don't pause mid story and wonder who is writing the story. There are a few oddball stories that leave you wondering, or stories that seem to have parts of them rushed, as if the author became tired of the story and wanted to wrap it up as quickly as possible.

If you're a fan of science fiction and women characters, this is worth checking out. You're bound to find something you'll like in the 20 stories.

male writers switch from pants to skirts perspective.......2003-11-06

Popular male writers provide engaging new tales in this anthology and successfully do so from a female perspective. The concept is intriguing, but obviously gimmicky too. The tales are well written entries that cross (no pun intended the gamut of sub-genre lines. Each one provides a first person account starring a female protagonist (in some cases antagonist might be a more apropos term). However, the fun in this nineteen tale anthology is not the gender switching, but in observing how males see females. Mike Resnick summarizes the tales best in his introduction to this collection when he quotes from his novel Outpost: "What's the most dangerous race you ever came across? Women! I mean an alien race. So do I." Readers will have a fine time seeing favorite writers switch from pants to skirts in an entertaining compilation.

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Extrapolation, published by Thomson Gale on March 22, 2005. The length of the article is 7332 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: From slash to the mainstream: female writers and gender blending men.
Author: Elizabeth Woledge
Publication: Extrapolation (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 46 Issue: 1 Page: 50(16)

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Customer Reviews:

no word less deconstructible than hope.......2006-02-01

This is not Walter Brueggemann's best book. Still, it is the measure of this man's perceptive insight that a lecture series at Princeton Theological Seminary with off-the-cuff roughnessess still evident can make for the kind of compelling reading that merely fine writers are fortunate to achieve once or twice in a career.

Ichabod is Bruggemann in his most oral mode and therefore at his least disciplined. What he achieves here is not precise exegesis. Rather, it is an example of florid proclamation that enters the shadows of biblical narrative and finds there passion and insight that might survive only in part after the sunrise.

The name `Ichabod' means `Where is the glory?!'. Though the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is full of oddly named children, Ichabod's moniker is surely among the strangest. Except that he never knew the mother who died giving birth to him while she bewailed Israel's loss of the ark of the covenant, we know nothing of the boy himself. Yet his mother's deathbed naming provides a narrative frame for a preoccupation with God's glory-and its loss-that is prominent in the Bible's conceptual world. Brueggemann is well poised to explore this little known text, for his rhetorical mastery is seldom more powerful than when he engages biblical narrative. The journeys of the ark of the covenant in 1 Samuel 4-6 throw up plenty of material for this prolific biblical scholar to throw down the lines that link a tale of devastation and recovery with the modern pastor's plight in a world where despair looms too temptingly, too often.

Brueggemann is sure that the loss described in his text is a `paradigmatic loss' `([I]chabod Departed', pp. 1-23), a loss beyond all other losses. An event narrated speaks of more than itself, though Brueggemann would want to insist that one must not lose sight of its texted particularity. Adumbrations of the loss that we abbreviate as `exile' are to be discerned in the Philistine rout of Israel and capture of the ark that is here described. Yet Bruggemann's fidelity to the burden of these chapters is best glimpsed in his awareness that some loss-this one for example, and others of which readers like me bear the scars-go beyond matters of guilt and broken covenant. They are, like the last century's Shoah, incomprehensible, even when not remotely comparable in scope and scale. Brueggemann wants his reader to understand that Yahwistic faith does not evade that fact.

In `Joy Comes in the Morning' (pp. 25-52), Brueggemann reframes the familiar biblical story of the Philistine god Dagon's nocturnal collapse in the presence of captured YHWH upon the ark with the knowing sentence: `The Philistine god had, in the night, lost his head, perhaps decapitated, or lost his head, gone mad, because trying to maintain preeminence in the presence of YHWH will drive one crazy.' Brueggemann's exposition of `YHWH's night-time work' is full of footnoted tribute to Patrick Miller and J.J.M. Roberts, eminent professors at the institution where the author originally delivered this text as a lecture series. The `turning' of YHWH from inert captive to muscle-flexed warrior cannot be explained, Brueggemann, even by Israel. The people's poets will later expand upon YHWH's paradigmatic turn to saving work, but here the narrative remains terse, unornamented, and viscerally short on detail. Yet the reality it describes is everything for YHWH and for Israel, even if these can be two different matters. Speaking to pastors, Brueggemann is less reserved about offering insights for the contemporary struggle than he might be in other venues, including gems like this one: `The characteristic liberal antidote to despair has been, against the narrative, the conviction that "God has not hands but ours." The characteristic conservative antidote to despair has been to return to a pre-Ebenezer condition, restore the old priesthood yet again.'

Brueggemann utilizes `(I)kabod Homeward' (pp. 53-84) to narrate the partial transfer-contagion perhaps-of Yahweh's glory to the Davidic monarchy. For the author, `the ark's primary business ... is the maintenance, sustenance, and prosperity of the Davidic governance.' For those who know Brueggemann's writing, the four nouns after the ellipsis do not promise condemnation, but acid reflection upon the compromises inherent in monarchy and its supportive ideology. Yet Brueggemann is uncharacteristically diplomatic at this point, masterfully attentive to what this narrative of the return of glory to a Davidic city would have meant for sixth-century exiles daring to hope for just such an outcome. Perhaps he is kind about glory rolling in Davidic directions because he stays close to the pathos of gloryless-ness, indeed he speaks as a man who has known it himself: `Friday is more than a blip in the flow from Sunday to Sunday. It is a staggering, deconstructive description on which our faith pivots. It becomes a warrant for noticing the deconstructive interruption in each of these journeys of cabod, for Israelite narrators and singers knew that the momentary capture of glory leaves an abiding tattoo on the God of glory ... The narrative reread permits us to see that the glory is wounded, exile-sobered, Friday-scarred, and Auschwitz-candid.'

Brueggemann pauses a moment from his visit to Ashdod and takes a theoretical turn in `The Bible Strange and New' (pp. 85-117). He wants to know what happens when the church stands before a biblical text like this one, a wonderment that he answers with a concept (profound nonfoundationalism) and a survey of three scholars who differ from him (A = Anderson, B = Barr, C = Childs). He makes a spirited defense in response to some of the critiques (Anderson, Childs) and criticism (Barr) that have emerged in the wake of his major 1997 statement (Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy). Buber and Barth are his models of nonfoundationalism, for both of them wrote at the end of an age and urged an encounter with the Bible in its raw alternative-bearing essence. One glimpses, respectively, Anderson, Barr, and Childs in Brueggemann's emulation of Barth and Buber's `passionate nonfoundationalism that does not yield too soon to conventional history, conventional reason, or conventional church consensus'.

Frequent readers will find in Bruggemann's conception of Bible-reading as guerrilla theatre a method for the occasional appearance of anti-ontological madness in his writing: `What the church does when it stands before the text, I propose, is that it engages in theatre; it entertains an alternative. It trust, moreover, that its theater is rooted in trusted reality that remains unproven and unprovable, grounded in no available universal and in no measured historicity.' This is stirring deconstruction of the universals that Brueggemann finds so confining and domesticating of the kind of churchly enactment he desires to support. Yet surely when the church does as he says, it encounters something and someone that can be described in some measure and trusted in. Anderson, Barr, and Childs-the first and third in radical discontinuity with the second-seem to be asking Childs to recognize and affirm such. He does not. In consequence Childs' most recent statements about Brueggemann seem close to a father's grief over a son's loss of faith, as Childs with his fidelity to canonical disclosure would insist the Church has always and everywhere defined it.

Brueggemann indulges a taste for sarcasm in `Have a Nice Weekend' (pp. 119-146) as he dissects the numbing flatness of reverencing the weekend that he sees in the American culture of his time. One wonders whether his blade might have been wielded rather more subtly had he looked on the pattern from the angle of common grace rather than merely as a mindless function of the market economy whose undeniable down side he seems loath to weigh against its benefits. Rest for the worker, for example.

Yet there is no denying that he has a point in his description of a Friday-Saturday-Sunday pattern leaves its prints on the story from Ashdod and leads, for the Christian, to a greater story that asks us not to rush Saturday, when all hope seems vain and all Saviors inert. For this reader, Brueggemann's final pages of this book now rank alongside the Andante Sostenuto of Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto in C Minor as the two finest statements of consummation that I know.

Still, one wonders. Brueggemann's radical nonfoundationalism seems without, well, any foundation. In his attempt to engage the postmodern mind, he has perhaps climbed out on a limb to the point where only rhetorical prowess of the kind he alone practices can arrest its downward tilt. Brueggemann might question whether we need the limb. Or the tree. Yet the biblical texts-whether read willy-nilly or as a canonical deposit, as his teacher Childs would have us do-seem to point beyond the infinite regression of redefinition to a something and a someone that can be delimited insofar as things and persons allow. Brueggemann hints-and, over against his critics, he insists-that he has not denied the givenness of history, merely deprivileged the whole topic.

Perhaps. One hopes and waits for a statement from this most prolific of biblical theologians about the much-derided happened-ness of biblical disclosure and whether this matters and can be known. Human experience, human perception-dare we still say human nature-seems deeply to need to know that there is a `yes' in there somewhere, else we wander far from Zion while the deconstructionists exhaust their/our material and explain that it was just a game.

Glory lost and regained-where is God when you need him most.......2004-11-24

Once again, Dr. Brueggeman fearlessly, takes one of the most puzzling incidents of old testament history and reflects profoundly upon this story, what it must have meant to the children of Isreal, and how should the church today wrestle with this text. Set in the story found in I Kings, he reviews and expounds upon the loss of the Ark of the Covenant in battle. How could the earthly seat of God be stolen? and could the glory of God be recovered??! and how? For those wanting to deepen their knowledge of old testament themes and what relevance those themes have for us today, a test most worthy of reading!

Prof Brueggemann Lectures like he teaches-- New Revision.......2002-09-10

Sitting in the classroom of Prof Brueggemann, you would not expect him to seem as commanding or imposing in presence as he appears in the pulpit preaching or in his Princeton Lectures! He opens his first lecture with, "The question of what the church is doing and is to do when it stands before the biblical text is a complicated...endlessly important question." While describing at length his response to the opening question, he brings great inclusion of a daily--yet never routine struggle with us in his company, "who struggle together mit endlessly contested issues."

Much like his manner of teaching: "There is no doubt that this text intends connections to the Exodus narrative." Then off our favorite Professor goes into favorite themes of Power & Economic relations. While moving through those crucial themes he reverts to his use of humor: Using the Philistines as enemies of God's chosen people, "who know the Credo news from Israel, perhaps having read Gerhard von Rad!" Of course our present day reading of von Rad would not have been possible in their timeline!

In the Columbia classroom he is never as imposing or threatening with his boundless resources of knowledge, wisdom, mit humor! In every visit to Columbia Seminary, I am overwhelmingly impressed. Chaplain Fred W. Hood

Ichabod Toward Home: The Journey of God's Glory

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Ichabod Toward Home: The Journey of God's Glory
Walter Brueggamann
Manufacturer: Wipf & Stock Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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