Trapped in the Nightmare of History

"Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." (from 'Stranger in the Village', James Baldwin)

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Here is an interesting page on James Joyce

http://www.amherst.edu/~clboudre/james_joyce


...nothing can be invented on the subject of Joyce. Everything we can say about Ulysses...has already been anticipated, including, we have seen, the scene about academic competence and the ingenuity of metadiscourse. We are caught in this net. All the gestures made in the attempt to take the initiative of a movement are found to be already announced in an overpotentialized text that will remind you, at a given moment, that you are captive in a network of language, writing, knowledge, and even narration. - Derrida (cited in one of the essays in the above link)