Joseph Valente

Professor of English, Critical Theory and Women’s Studies; Co-Director, Committee for Irish Studies; Co-Director, Project for the Study of Modernism and Cultural Nationalism

Office: 107B English
Office Phone: 333-2244

email

Courses

English 455: MAJOR AUTHORS
TOPIC: T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams

ENGLISH 245: THE SHORT STORY

ENGLISH 543: SEMINAR IN MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE
TOPIC: Yeats and the Conundrum of Ethnicity

ENGLISH 210 X: ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 1798 TO THE PRESENT

Areas of Interest

Late-Victorian and Modern British and Irish Literature and Culture Literary, Postcolonial, Psychoanalytic, Feminist and Queer Theory

Publications

Books:

Unlocking Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the Question of
Blood (U. of Illinois Press, 2002).

James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial
Difference (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Quare Joyce (edited collection, U. of Michigan Press, 1998).

Disciplinarity at the Fin-de-Siecle (edited with Amanda Anderson,
Princeton University Press, 2002).

Journal Issues:

Guest Editor, Joyce and Homosexuality, a Special Issue of the James
Joyce Quarterly, 31 (Spring 1994).

Guest Co-Editor, Joyce and the Law, a Special Issue of the James Joyce
Quarterly, 37 (Spring 2002).

Articles:

"Hall of Mirrors: Baudrillard on Marx," Diacritics, 15 (1985), 54-65.

"Upon the Braes: History and Hermeneutics in Waverley,"
Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 251-276.

"Against Robust Relativism," The Philosophical Forum, XVII (1986),
296-321.

"Beyond Truth and Freedom: The New Faith of Joyce and Nietzche,"
James Joyce Quarterly, 25 (1987), 87-103.

"The Politics of Joyce's Polyphone," in New Alliances in Joyce Studies,
ed. B.K. Scott (Newark: U. of Delaware Press , 1988), 56-69.

"Coming to Judgment," Pre/Text, 10 (1989), 201-207 [Released 1991]

"Joyce's Sexual Differend: An Example from Dubliners," James Joyce
Quarterly, 28 (1991), 427-443.

"Examining Uncertainty," Style, 25 (1991), 506-513.

"Joyce Studies Annual 1990," Review Essay, James Joyce Quarterly,
29.2 (1992), 443-451.

"Who Made the Tune: Becoming Woman in `Sirens,'" James Joyce
Quarterly, 30 (1993), 191-208.

"Thrilled By His Touch: Homosexual Panic and the Will to Artistry in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" James Joyce
Quarterly, 31, 1994, 167-188.

"The Myth of Sovereignty: Gender in the Literature of Irish
Nationalism," ELH, 61 (1994), 189-210.

"`A Quhare Sort of a Mahan': Joyce's Same-Sexed Other-Text,"
James Joyce Quarterly, 31 (1994), 141-146.

"Fashionable Theory, Fashion-able Women: Returning Diana Fuss's
Homospectatorial Look" (with Molly Anne Rothenberg)*,
Critical Inquiry, 22 (1996), 372-382.

*(Reprinted in Identities, ed. K.A. Appiah and H.L. Gates, Jr.
(Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1995), 413-423.

"The Novel and the Police (Gazette)," Novel, 29, 1995, 8-19.

"James Joyce and the Cosmopolitan Sublime," in Joyce and the
Subject of History, eds. M. Wollaeger, V. Luftig,
and R. Spoo (Ann Arbor, U. of Michigan Press, 1996), 59-80.

"Performative Chic" (with Molly Anne Rothenberg), College Literature,
24.1, 1997, 295-305.

"More of the Same: From Ideology to Simulation with Baudrillard," in
Postmodern Discourses on Ideology, ed. T. Ebert and
M. Zavarzadeh (Gainesville: U. of Florida Press,
forthcoming).

“A Child is Being Eaten: Mourning, Transvestism, and the
Incorporation of the Daughter in Ulysses," James
Joyce Quarterly, 34.1-2, Winter 1997, 21-64.

“Rehearsing the Witch Trials: Gender Injustice in The Crucible," New
Formations, 32, Autumn 1997, 120-134.

“Joyce’s (Sexual) Choices: An Historical Overview,” in Quare Joyce,
ed. J. Valente (Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 1998), 1-16.

“Thrilled By His Touch: The Aestheticizing of Homosexual Panic in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” in Quare Joyce,
ed. J. Valente (Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 1998)
47-66.

*(Reprinted in The Oxford Casebook on A Portrait of the Artist as
the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Mark Wollaeger,
forthcoming)

“Tactics and the Metrocolonial Condition in James Joyce's Dubliners,”
Narrative, 6, Fall 1998, 325-340.

"Scylla and Charybdis; or the Perils of Masculinity," in "Ulysses":
En-gendered Perspectives, ed. K. Devlin and M. Reizbaum
(Columbia: U. of South Carolina Press, 1999), 175-203.

“Neither Fish Nor Flesh: James Joyce and the Conundrum of Irish
Manhood” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. D. Attridge and
M. Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
96-127.

“Double Born: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic,” Modern
Fiction Studies, 31, Fall 2000, 632-645.

“Discipline and Freedom,” (with A. Anderson) in Disciplinarity at the
Fin De Siecle, ed. A. Anderson and J. Valente (Princeton
UP, 2001)

“Identification Trouble,” (with Molly Anne Rothenberg), Gender and
Psychoanalysis, forthcoming.

“Lacan’s Marxism/Marxism’s Lacan,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabate (forthcoming,
Cambridge UP, 2003)

“(m)Othering Himself: Abjection and Cross-Gender Identification in
Giacomo Joyce,” in Envoys of Otherness, ed. Lawrence
James and Clare Wallace (forthcoming, Maunsel Press)

“Joyce and Sexuality,” for The New Cambridge Companion to James
Joyce, ed. D. Attridge (forthcoming, Cambridge UP, 2003)

Reviews:

"Stealing as Righting," Review of Murray McArthur, Stolen Writings,
in James Joyce Literary Supplement, 4 (1990), 8-9.

“Critical Mass?” A Review of Michael Tratner’s Modernism and Mass
Culture, James Joyce Literary Supplement, 18, 1997, 12-13.

“Joyce and Hagiography:Saints Above!” by R.J.Schork, reviewed
in Modern Fiction Studies, forthcoming.

Works in Progress

Book Manuscripts:

Contested Territory: Race and Manhood in Modern Irish
Literature.

I will be exploring the anxieties and ambivalences haunting the construction of masculinity in Irish nationalist literature of the Modern period. To this end, I will detail

1)how the longstanding Anglo-Saxon feminization of Ireland took a racialist turn in nineteenth century;

2)how the Irish nationalist response divided between its own equally longstanding practice of allegorizing Ireland as a woman and a type of parade virile known as "colonial hypermasculinity";

3)how the works of Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Gonne, Wilde, Bowen, and others deployed the forms of family romance promulgated in the current sexological and psychoanalytic discourses to intervene in these colonial gender allegories and to express the psychomachia of a people torn both in their gender identifications and their ethnic allegiances.

(Requested by Cambridge UP, University of Illinois Press)

Renaissance Nation: On the Minority Modernist Revival
(with William J. Maxwell)

Our book proposes to explore the self-conscious ideological similarities of the Celtic and the Harlem Renaissances with one eye to situating them in the history of modernism’s signature engagement with the the urban metropolis and the other eye to situating present day debates over identity politics, minority representation and multiculturalism within a history that these revivals decisively shaped.
(Requested by Princeton UP)

Paper Tigers: The Crisis of Agency in Cultural Theory Today
(with Molly Anne Rothenberg).

Our book proposes to demarcate the premier debate in contemporary cultural theory, "How does the subject stand qua political agency?"; to canvass and evaluate the positions of the main adversaries, the historicist/cultural studies descendants of Michel Foucault (Butler, Fuss, Bhabha) and the psychoanalytic progeny of Jacques Lacan (Zizek, Laclau, Copjec); to explore the underlying stakes of this disagreement and suggest how these stakes bind the camps together in their very antagonism; and finally, to articulate a more rigorous and capacious account of the subject and its claims to agency.

Articles

“Roman Catholicism as Transnationalism in Joyce” for The
Palgrave Companion to Joyce (ed. Jean-Michel Rabate)

“Ethnostalgia; or the Feel of Not To Feel It”

“’While Ireland Holds these Graves’: Gothic and the Celtic
Revival”

Honors and Awards

Critical Research Initiative Grant, 2002-2004

Illinois Program Reading Group Award, 2002

Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Fellowship,
2000-2001.[For Renaissance Nation]

Mellon Fellowship for Postdoctoral Research, Newberry
Library, Chicago, Illinois, 2000. [For Contested Territory:
Race and Manhood in Modern Irish Literature]

University of Illinois List of Excellent Teachers 1997,1999,2001

Center for Advanced Study Fellowship, University of Illinois,
Spring 1997

University of Illinois Nominee for the Gustave O. Arldt Award
for the Best Book in Literary Criticism, 1996

International James Joyce Foundation Scholarship, Zurich
James Joyce Institute, Spring 1995

Mellon Fellowship, Literary Theory Seminar, Tulane University,
1993

Mellon Fellowship, Literary Theory Seminar, Tulane University,
1991

Conferences Organized

Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siecle (with Amanda Anderson),
Champaign-Urbana, IL., October 1-3, 1998.

Courses Taught

James Joyce and the Problem of Colonial Modernism
19th Century Novel
Literature of the Unconscious
Bildungsroman
Introduction to Modern Literature
Introduction to Literary Theory
Feminist Theory
20th Century Irish Literature
(Re)Writing the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy
From Narrative to Anti-Narrative
British Literature 1798-Present
The Novel of Short Stories
Interdisciplinary Models of Interpretation
The Political Quest Novel of the 1960's
Learning and Unlearning Literature
Honors Writing
Postmodern Literature and Science
The Homocolonial Moment: The Case of Ireland
The British Novel: Modernism and the Failure of Mourning
The Celtic and the Harlem Renaissance
The Irish Revival
Mythopoetics/Mythopolitics in Irish Modernism
From Marxism to Post-Structuralism
Social Distinction in the Modern British Novel
Joyce and Yeats
Yeats and the Poetics of Nationalism