Post-Structuralist Joyce

Book excerpt: This volume is devoted to translations of some of the most significant criticism of James Joyce to have appeared in French journals over the last twenty, years. Joyce has been a great stimulus for new modes of theoretical and critical inquiry in France, which have in turn exerted a profound influence on the intellectual climate both in the UK and in North America. In their shared preoccupations with the mechanisms of textuality and the implications thereof for the writing-and-reading subject, all the contributors to this volume, who include Hélène Cixous, Jacques Aubert, JeanMichel Rabaté, André Topia and Jacques Derrida, form part of the movement away from the structuralism that dominated intellectual discussion in the 1960s to what is now called (though not in France itself), 'post-structuralism'.