Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce

"The first comprehensive study of Joyce and the advertising/commodity nexus. . . . Provides the next step in understanding Joyce--for which Joyceans worldwide are ready and waiting. And it does so eloquently and persuasively and in enormously careful detail and depth of vision. . . . I love this book; I learned from this book. . . . An up-to-date and dramatically useful inquiry into Joycean modernism."--Cheryl Herr, University of Iowa

"The best book on Joyce I have read in years. . . . [Leonard] offers new insights, novel readings, and creative interpretations on every page, and all in a brilliantly funny, irreverent prose which captures the moment or the character like a Joycean epiphany."--Zack Bowen

Garry Leonard looks in detail at Joyce's representation of a phenomenon that dominates the contemporary landscape: advertising. Taking readers back to its beginnings, Leonard shows that advertising was a central preoccupation of Joyce, one that helps us unravel his often difficult style.

Building on the work of cultural theorists like Lacan, Foucault, Baudrillard, Irigiray, and others, Leonard examines commodity culture in Joyce's work and demonstrates the ways in which characters use (or are used by) modern advertising techniques to make their own identities more intelligible and to fill the Lacanian "permanent lack" of modern identity.

The commonality of religion and advertising, the use of "kitsch" as a rhetorical device, the commodity market's exploitation of the proletariat, the role of pornography, the impact of advertising's "normative" modes of dress and behavior, and the role of the modern city as a modernist trope are all explored as aspects of Joyce's work or as pressures faced by his characters. As Leonard demonstrates, "culture" in Joyce is the product of a complex response to psychological, sociological, political, economic, and aesthetic pressures. In Joyce, advertising, as a product of that culture, serves both to reinforce the hegemonic discourse of the day and to subvert it.

Excellent work has been done on aspects of commodity culture in Joyce by writers as diverse as Bonnie Kime Scott, Jennifer Wicke, and Brandon Kershner (Joyce and Popular Culture, UPF, 1996), but Leonard's is the first comprehensive study of Joyce and the advertising/commodity nexus, certain to be of equal interest to students and scholars of Joyce, modernism, and cultural studies.

Garry Leonard is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto and author of Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective (1993).