Focusing not only on the most important technical, but also on the often overlooked psychological and spiritual elements of learning to sing, The Naked Voice allows readers to develop their own full and individual identities as singers

A groundbreaking portrait of Kerouac as a young artist—from the award-winning author of Minor Characters In The Voice is All, Joyce Johnson, author of her classic memoir, Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac, brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac’s French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider’s vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road, followed by Visions of Cody. By illuminating Kerouac’s early choice to sacrifice everything to his work, The Voice Is All deals with him on his own terms and puts the tragic contradictions of his nature and his complex relationships into perspective.

Gathers together interpretations of Joyce's work by scholars in a wide span of disciplines: music, history, literature, philosophy, sport, geography, modern languages, economics, theatre studies, and law. The depth and range of James Joyce's relationship with key historical, intellectual, and cultural issues in the early twentieth century are explored. The twenty essays in this collection draw out the openness and pluralism of Joyce's writing and underscore the need for readings of his work from a large variety of diverging perspectives.

“A brilliantly collaged snapshot of the variety and wealth of literary criticism, and Joyce studies, today.”—Tony Thwaites, author of Joycean Temporalities “Celebrates the multiplicity and sheer rampant excess of Joyce’s prodigally polysemous text with seventeen different scholars employing a likewise prodigal range of critical methodologies.”—Patrick O’Neill, author of Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes “Each of the scholars involved is at the top of his and her game. Their commitment and excitement about the task at hand is evident on virtually every page. This book makes the Wake relevant and accessible to a whole new generation of readers.”—Garry Leonard, author of Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce This is the first Finnegans Wake guide to focus exclusively on the multiple meanings and voices in Joyce’s notoriously intricate diction. Rather than leveling the text it illuminates many layers of puns, wordplay, and portmanteaus, celebrating the Wake’s central experimental technique. Renowned Joyce scholars explore the polyvocality of individual chapters using game theory, ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, historicism, myth, philosophy, genetic studies, feminism, and other critical frameworks. They set in motion cross-currents and radiating structures of meaning that permeate the entire text and open up satisfying readings of the Wake for novices and seasoned readers alike. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

A celebration of canine companions in poems, prose, and pictures: “The selections are funny, adoring, exasperated, and most of all grateful” (Booklist). There’s no relationship quite like the ones we have with our dogs—dogs who befriend us; dogs who annoy, perplex, and accept us. This book explores the special bond between teenagers and their dogs—how days of crowded hallways, pointless assignments, and blinding crushes are brought to balance by our dogs. Including insightful poems by Joyce Sidman and essays in which teens speak for themselves, as well as beautiful photographs by Doug Mindell, The World According to Dog reminds us that at the end of the day, waiting at home, there is always Dog—full of hope and companionship.

Though James Joyce was steeped in philosophy and humanism, he has received too little attention from contemporary philosophers in comparison to many of the other titans of modernist fiction. This book probes the possibilities for thinking philosophically about Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, presenting readings by renowned scholars such David Hills, Garry L. Hagberg, Vicki Mahaffey, Martha C. Nussbaum, Sam Slote, Wendy J. Truran, and Philip Kitcher, who also provides an introduction to the volume that considers broader themes and situates Ulysses as a work of philosophical interest. For the central characters of Ulysses--Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, "How to live?" is an urgent question. Each must either start anew, or attempt to recover lost paths. Chapters plumb the depths of the philosophical quandaries that present themselves to these characters--reflections on death and overcoming disgust, Leopold Bloom's evocations of conscious thought, the dominance of vision in our thinking about the senses, identity, and the possibility of revising one's values are only a handful of the subjects covered in the volume. Ulysses is an intrinsically and deeply philosophical work, and these readings provide new inroads and firm orientation for Joyce's project. Readers will come away with renewed appreciation for one of our greatest works of literature in the English language, and deepened understanding of Joyce's attempt to offer alternative ways of structuring and enriching the world of our experience.

"At last, a scrupulous and sustained--'earsighted'--study of that shadowy yet vital intersection of sound and sense without which literary reading remains a disembodied exercise. . . . Stewart immerses us brilliantly in the poststructural method of a 'phonemic' analysis."--Geoffrey H. Hartman, author of Saving the Text "Stunningly articulate. . . . Alongside brilliant exegeses of passsages from the major English poets, Stewart offers new and dazzling interpretations of the 'poetics of prose' in such novelists as Dickens, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The book is a tour de force, no doubt about it. In my opinion, Reading Voices will have not only a wide but a lasting reception."--Hayden White, author of Metahistory "This is exciting, virtuoso work in a playfully imaginative hermeneutic mode. Stewart's ear hears fascinating and compelling things, things which have a delightfully rich and thematically complex bearing on much larger textual issues."--Paul Fry, author of The Reach of Criticism "A truly original book. . . . The first work in years to bring together linguistically informed criticism with more philosophically oriented literary theory. The resulting vision of literature is odd, personal, passionate, even outlandish. Not only is Stewart himself and extraordinary stylist, but his work suggests a breakthrough in stylistic criticism so radical as to revitalize the entire field."--Jay Clayton, author of Romantic Vision and the Novel

“A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?” --Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a Rat Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one’s family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it? My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently “informs” on her brothers, setting into motion their arrests and convictions and her own long estrangement. Arresting and poignant, My Life as a Rat traces a life of banishment from a family—banishment from parents, siblings, and the Church—that forces Violet to discover her own identity, to break the powerful spell of family, and to emerge from her long exile as a “rat” into a transformed life.

For decades, James Joyce’s modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe’s urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure. In Joyce’s Ghosts, Luke Gibbons mounts a powerful argument that this view is mistaken: Joyce’s Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism, informing his most distinctive literary experiments. Ireland, Gibbons shows, is not just a source of subject matter or content for Joyce, but of form itself. Joyce’s stylistic innovations can be traced at least as much to the tragedies of Irish history as to the shock of European modernity, as he explores the incomplete project of inner life under colonialism. Joyce’s language, Gibbons reveals, is haunted by ghosts, less concerned with the stream of consciousness than with a vernacular interior dialogue, the “shout in the street,” that gives room to outside voices and shadowy presences, the disruptions of a late colonial culture in crisis. Showing us how memory under modernism breaks free of the nightmare of history, and how in doing so it gives birth to new forms, Gibbons forces us to think anew about Joyce’s achievement and its foundations.