Sheldon Brivic
sbrivic@temple.edu
Sheldon Brivic is a leading authority on James Joyce and psychoanalysis who has also developed an interest in modem American fiction. Books of his in both fields were just accepted. The Joycean study, to be published by Paigrave-Macmillan, is called “Joyce, Lacan, and Zižek: Exploring in Language.” His fifth book on Joyce, it begins by identifying for the first time the primary model of writing in Joyce’s novels. It ends by arguing that the conclusion of Joyce’s last novel predicts the rise of Asia to the center of world power. It also explains Lacan’s Seminars on Joyce, the analyst’s major statement on literature, in clear and comprehensible terms.
This book should be the first to relate Joyce to the sensational culture critic Slavoj Zižek. Earlier, Brivic wrote the first Lacanian book on Joyce, The Veil of Signs: Joyce, Lacan, and Perception (1991). Before that, he wrote the first psychoanalytic study of Joyce, Joyce between Freud and Jung (1980). So if he does put out the first Zižekian book on Joyce, it would complete a trifecta.
Brivic never gets tired of Joyce and is looking forward to new discoveries with the Irish bard. The other two books by Brivic were Joyce the Creator (1985), which describes how Joyce plays the role of God in his work, and Joyce’s Waking Women (1995), a feminist study of Finnegans Wake. In addition, he edited, with Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, a special issue of James Joyce Quarterly called “Joyce between Genders: Lacanian Views” (1991).
Brivic’s other forthcoming book is “The Racial Interface of Modern American Fiction: Faulkner, Wright, Pynchon, Morrison,” which will be put out by Louisiana State University Press in 2008. This book moves between white and black writers to demonstrate that American fiction is an interaction of European-American and African- American cultures. As an offshoot of this project, he is now editing, with Margo Crawford, a collection of essays on Toni Morrison’s trilogy (Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise). The collection will include a modified chapter of the book.
The latest articles from Brivic, both in James Joyce Quarterly, are “Stephen Dedalus’s Fantasies of Reality: A Zižekian View,” and “Joyce, Lyotard, and what Can be Written.’ When Brivic read an earlier version of the latter at a Joyce Symposium in London in 2000, Dr. Mohammed Darweesh of Iraq was in the audience and told Brivic that he liked the paper and wanted to translate it into Arabic. Brivic gave permission, and the paper appeared in a Baghdad literary magazine called Al Aqlam late in 2000.
Brivic received his M.A. from the City University of New York and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is on the editorial boards of James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies Annual, and Journal of Modern Literature. His articles have appeared in NOVEL, Massachusetts Review, and ELH, among other journals, and in books published by Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois, among other presses. His pieces have also come out in Canada, Ireland, Spain, and Japan. Thirty-five of these articles are on Joyce and two are on Virginia Woolf. Others are on Richard Wright, Jorge Luis Borges, the Tristan Legend, and a Scottish folk-rock group.
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