ABSTRACT
In a meticulously researched study of the ‘New Joyce’ created by Joycean interest in France, Geert Lernout shows Joyce as a rich text for postmodernist inquiry, of which Terry Eagleton describes Finnegans Wake as the touchstone. Postmodernism is described by Lernout as diachronic, and poststructuralism critiques or attacks its logical positivistic, metaphysical ground. Its precursors are the German philosophers Hegel and Heidegger, and it is influenced by Freud’s work in France and German-French political relations. It is negative about and oppositional to ‘doctrine’, and Lernout discovers a paradigm for poststructuralist criticism in the work of Cixous, Derrida, and Sollers.
