Chapter 13 - Emergency Aesthetics

Summary

He was part of their foreign policy, of the drive to make the USA a cultural presence and to recruit ‘high’ culture to its mission of world-domination. Ulysses became a seminal work because it showed how a broken European culture could be absorbed into ‘modernity’. The reception of Joyce was a politically loaded issue in the Cold War; because of that Joycean studies became an industry, producing a cultural weaponry that remains effective, the Hiberno-Grecian gift that keeps on giving. Classical and Christian echoes sounded throughout the local Irish setting; American academics alerted us to them, annotated them for us. In addition, Ulysses implied the possibility of a structure in history; this was later replaced in the Wake by a history of structures. These turned out to be really one structure, of which Irish history was exemplary, the small world that was a microcosm of all.