ABSTRACT
James Joyce is, arguably, the most securely canonized modernist writer today. There is little wonder that he should become a target for revisionary feminists, considering a traditional history that situates him in the classic masculine traditions of Greek and Latin language and myth, amid the male makers of modernism, and in the hegemony of an academy designed and dominated by men. Two of the matriarchs of the second wave of feminism, Florence Howe and Carolyn Heilbrun, found only masculine vision in Joyce's writing. Sustaining a modernist battle of the sexes in No Man's Land, Vol. 1: The War of the Words, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have proposed a feminine fantasy of language to counter presumed attempts at linguistic mastery by modernist males. Gilbert and Gubar read the language of joyce's Molly Bloom as a /lscatologos" and an example of li'linguistic misogyny" (No Man's Land 231-232). In an earlier essay they are uneasy with lJ£eminologist re-Joycings" ("Sexual Linguistics" 519), and with their own Joycean pun, "Derridaughters" (521), demean feminists using French psychoanalytic and deconstructive theory.
