Overview

This book presents two major critical reorientations, developing new positions on James Joyce and Jacques Derrida by reading them together within a shared modernity. It places these readings in relation to each other through a conceptual history of maximalism and minimalism, situating literature, philosophy and the history of aesthetics within the context of the closure of metaphysics. Through this revised reading of Joyce, Joycean Minimalism, Derridean Maximalism resituates the reception and periodisation of modernism. It also argues that the configuration of modernism and deconstruction it develops demonstrates a shared austerity one that is located in a mutual philosophical inquiry into self-presence between literature and deconstruction. Overall, Maria-Daniella Dick highlights the contemporaneity of deconstruction in the age of postcritique.

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9781474491983

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Reviews

Describing Joyce as a 'Minimalist' and Derrida as a 'Maximalist', Dick's wonderfully astute analysis inverts an alternative that splits modernism (Joyce's maximalism aiming at omnipotence vs. Beckett's minimalism haunted by impotence.) By inserting Derrida's deconstructive machine, she raises the theoretical stakes and proves that modernism can both remobilize philosophy and keep literature flourishing.--Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences:

Describing Joyce as a ‘Minimalist’ and Derrida as a ‘Maximalist’, Dick’s wonderfully astute analysis inverts an alternative that splits modernism (Joyce’s maximalism aiming at omnipotence vs. Beckett's minimalism haunted by impotence.) By inserting Derrida’s deconstructive machine, she raises the theoretical stakes and proves that modernism can both remobilize philosophy and keep literature flourishing. -- Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences:

Author Information

Maria-Daniella Dick is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are in Derrida, Joyce, modern and contemporary literature, and continental philosophy. She has published widely in these areas, on the intersection of international modernism and modernity with continental philosophy and critical theory, and on the comparative and European dimensions of Irish and Scottish culture. She is the co-author of Late Capitalist Freud, with Robbie McLaughlan (2020), and The Derrida Wordbook, with Julian Wolfreys (2013).

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