How can a feminist begin to approach the writings of James Joyce? ... male linguistic mastery ... signifier of signified, the Freudian phallus ... recreate the world in his own mental image ... [2] Joyce’s putative feminism ... virgin and whore ... [2]

In Joyce’s canon, women both subject ad object of desire ... [2]

Both Catholic piety and Celtic sentimental attitudes cloak repressed sexual hostilities that adhere to the dark underside of Irish life. [4]

Exiles ... Bertha ... proves to be a fiery, autonomous individual who rebels against Richard’s arrogant manipulations and demands recognition in her own right as a central a centrally heroic figure in the play. [6]

Joyce’s anti-patriarchal obsession ... [7] ALP, the she-truth of female jouissance and the ultimate limit of any discourse articulated by man [7]

[I]n Finnegans Wake a male master narrative gives way to a fluid feminine story in a linguistic bricolage that valorises non-mastery and explodes the perpetual western preoccupation with a Neitszchean will to power. [8]

Biographical evidence suggests that Joyce eventually came to terms with the kind of adolescent misogyny earlier exhibited by his fictional surrogate Stephen Dedalus. [8]

the seamless unified self ... which is commonly called ‘Man’ ... is in fact a phallic self, constructed on the model of the self-contained, powerful phallus ... phallogocentric. [10]

His writing introduces a lexical play-field that challenges the assumptions of traditional culture, including phallocentric authority and logocentric discourse ... subverts the name and the law of the Father and delights in the subvocal utterances of ‘granda’s grammar’, that fluid and elusive semiotexte ...’ [11]

Father Flynn’s rigor mortis ... phallic stiff rod ... [12]; females ... unable to master male discourse ... function as servants to the cultural imperatives [15]

Mr Duffy: because he had once aspired to Oedipal union with her idealised figure, he now feels horror and repulsion at the though of shameful incestuous congress [36] ... he at last confronts the reality of existential isolation [37]

In an atmosphere of backbiting and petty-mindedness, the noble ideals of the Celtic Renaissance envisaged by William Butler Years, John Millington Synge, and Lady Gregory are shockingly absent from Irish cultural practice. [41]

By offering a vivid myth of salutory passion, Gretta rejuvenates the moribund spirit of her husband and ... emerges as the first of Joyce’s extraordinary female characters. [48]

Casey: Spitting in her eye, he symbolically achieves a talismanic victory through sexual violation of the threatening phallic mother. [57]

Emma: above all, to preserve her virginity as a commodity of exchange on the competitive Dublin marriage market.

Vilanelle: the poem that he pens provides an emotional circuit of substitution that short-circuits libidinal drive and sublimates Eros to the symbolic order of Daedalus/Byron/ Stephen/Father/Joyce. [63]

Henke ascribes inter faeces et urinas to Augustine, not Tertullian. [64]

19th c. Irish Catholicism demands that he psychologically castrate himself by consenting to the grotesque dissociation of ego and id. [71]

Bird-girl: the boy’s fantasy recreates a repressed vision of female genitalia spreading in luxuriant pink-rose petals before his aroused phallic consciousness ... woman’s body revealing its vulvular mysteries and palpitating with the crimson flush of physical stimulation.

Leaden analogy with Keats [101]

The Catholic priesthood offers Stephen a chance to consummation this narcissistic love-affair with his psyche. [73]

Bound together in a piquant discourse of their amorous longing, the couple has left a gap in experience, creating a phallic wound of ever-living doubt that will, through a reversal (and triangulation) of metaphorical insemination, penetrate and impregnate the womb of Richard’s own artistic imagination. [102]

luminosity of doubt ... ‘wounded him there where love lies bleeding ... darkening even his own understanding of himself’ [U] [104]

Throughout Ulysses, ‘Baby Bloom’ finds himself tantalised by purportedly feminine pulsions that replicate the infantile attachment to the imaginary body of a beneficent and powerful phallic mother. [106]

although he has crassly reduce women to figures of an oral, genital, and anal absence (‘three holes’) ... [109]

The primordial sign of Bloom’s maleness, his phallus, is first symbolically presented, thenabsent in the game of sexual metamorphosis ... that entails cross-dressing [111]

... the phallic icon of Bloom’s socially sanctioned manhood ... [111]

... the impotent Bloom ... is defined in terms of phallic lack [112]

... as woman/Jew/victim, the hapless Poldy is reduced to a cypher of racial and sexual oppression [115]

The presence-absence of Boylan’s ithyphallic member signifies for the excited onlooker both masochistic humiliation and scopophiliac jouissance. [118] ...

Libidinal desire gives rise to a polymorphous dissemination of sexual signifiers that destroy the univocal, phallocentric drives of masculinity and articulate deep-seated transexual fantasies embedded in the psyche of Joyce’s womanly man. [119]

Bloom’s memories of Howth: obsessively tires to go back to that far-off time of his inaugural love-making ... Warm female flesh signifies a prtextive matrix of maternal and spousal love that once valorised Baby-Bloom in a position of an integrated subject and sheltered him from the confusions of psychic fragmentation. [123]

can(n)on; (M)Other love; his-story

Molly: while searching for the lost mother of childhood fantasy, she is simultaneously compelled to re-enact the family romance of Oedipal attraction. She suffers from a proverbial Freudian separation of emotional and erotic satisfactions. [135] On the afternoon of June 16, Molly is enacting a psychological drama patterned on unresolved Oedipal fixations. [136]

Although she recognises the inequities of Edwardian sexual scripts, Molly never seriously contemplates the possibility of altering those cultural and political structures responsible for gender discrimination. [142]

In an open market geared to the demands of a male libidinal economy ... [142]

affair with Boylan her first complete sexual act in ten years [151]

The emotional gaps in Molly’s past engender, throughout ‘Penelope’ a subvrsive feminine discourse that defies logocentric boundaries, borders on the margins of hysteria, and, in its melancholic quest for the absent (M)Other, longs to suoture the wound of pre-Oedipal separation.’ [161]

Molly and Leopold handle the Lacanian experience of radical ‘lack’ by nostalgically endowing one another with theological wholeness and plenitude. [162]

Wake readers are plotters and textists. [165]

Anna bears in her wake the mysterious forces of the id and the buried libido erupting from the subterranean world of a farriginous textual consciousness. [166]

Either/or interpretation of Prankquean. [168-8]

Through FW, man disposes and disperses; he erects, then destroys ... it is the female, in contrast, who burrows in the dungheap of dissonant experience and rescues the orts, scraps, and fragments of a more tentative and polyvalent bricolage constituent of ‘femaline’ culture. [167]

[Henke interprets Kevin:] he succombs to the latent temptations of the female and immerses in her stream. Joyce revises the myth of Kevin so as to show the monk forgetting his celibacy and seducing - with admirable foreplay - the aquacious female.

The elusive concept of feminine writing has recently been instantiated by such diverse critics as [and then she names a host of very similar feminist ideologues.] [205]

The archetypal patriarch, ... longs to inscribe his phallocentric signature onto the resistant body of a resilient Mother Earth. [210]

From certain parallactic perspectives, Joyce’s postmodern oeuvre can be envisged as contiguous with the projects of feminist fabulation ... his writing annuls classical notions of identity and origin, of metaphysical authority and textual closure.... it plays with the endless dissemination of secul[ar] difference that eludes the Oedipal configurations of patriachal power. [211]

Ftn: ‘Bloom is suffering from secondary impotence, the inability to complete the sexual act for reasons of anxiety or trauma [though] Bloom clearly retains the ability to experience both erection and ejaculation ... [his] usual practice is to kiss Molly’s bottom and bring himself to orgasm on her backside.’ [255]

Summarises the pros and cons of Joyce in feminist criticism in her Ricorso.