Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T09:23:42.140Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hunting Epiphany-Hunters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Sidney Feshbach
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Robert Scholes's view that Joyce was primarily interested in constructing a genre composed of epiphanies as texts, and not equally interested in the epiphany as a process of esthetic apprehension or in the possible use of the epiphany as a structural principle, is disputed in these comments. This argument seeks to establish briefly that Joyce held the epiphany—process and text—as essentially integrated and inseparable. The comments are a response to Robert Scholes's correspondence with Florence Walzl (PMLA, March 1967).

Type
Notes, Documents, and Critical Comment
Information
PMLA , Volume 87 , Issue 2 , March 1972 , pp. 304 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 “Epiphany-hunting is a harmless pastime and ought probably to be condoned, like symbol-hunting, archetype-hunting, Scrabble, and other intellectual creations.” Scholes, “Joyce and the Epiphany: The Key to the Labyrinth?” Sewanee Review, 72 (1964), 66. Scholes and A. Walton Litz, eds., Dubliners (New York: Viking, 1969), p. 255. Scholes and R. M. Kain, eds., The Workshop of Daedalus (Evanston, 111. : Northwestern Univ. Press, 1965).

2 Correspondence of R. Scholes and Florence L. Walzl, PMLA, 82(1967), 152.

3 Scholes, “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Genre,” Novel, 2 (Winter 1969), 104.

4 James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. T. Spencer (New York: New Directions, 1944), p. 211.

6 Stephen Hero, pp. 211–13. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. C. G. Anderson (New York: Viking, 1968), pp. 204–16.

6 Sewanee Review, p. 72.

7 Stephen Hero, p. 213; Portrait, p. 212.

8 See my essay on A Portrait, “A Slow and Dark Birth,” James Joyce Quarterly, 4 (1967), 289–300, and my forthcoming essays on “The Dead.”

9 Workshop, pp. 4–5.

10 James Joyce, Letters, eds. S. Gilbert and R. Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), ii, 35. Date given by Ellmann is 9 March; by Scholes, 20 March.

11 Workshop, p. 4.

12 Sewanee Review, p. 75.

13 Sewanee Review, p. 76.

14 Workshop, p. 15.

15 Portrait, pp. 67–68.

16 Portrait, pp. 67–70.

17 Portrait, p. 67.