It was with an enigma that Joseph Campbell entered the labyrinth of James Joyce. In 1927 Campbell traveled to Paris to study medieval philology and Old French and Provençal. Almost immediately he encountered Ulysses. When he got to Chapter Three of Joyce’s masterpiece, “Proteus,” he was puzzled by the opening: “Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read. . . .” He took this enigma to the legendary bookstore owner, and original publisher of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach, at her store Shakespeare and Company at 12 rue de l’Odéon. “I went around there in high academic indignation,” he wrote. “And she gave me the clues to how to read it. And there you have it, how it changed my career.”
Campbell moved through the labyrinth of Joyce’s creation for sixty years — writing, lecturing, reading Joyce’s works to students and audiences worldwide, using depth psychology, comparative religion, anthropology, and art history as tools of analysis. His lectures and reading introduced two generations to the works of James Joyce. What Campbell discovered became the foundation for his work in comparative mythology and religion.
Mythic Worlds, Modern Words provides a representation of Campbell’s published writing, lectures on Joyce, and exchanges with his audiences, from his obituary notice on Joyce in 1941 to lectures delivered a few years before Campbell’s death. Joyce scholar Edmund L. Epstein has arranged this material as running commentary on A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake. With a new foreword by Phil Cousineau for this “Collected Works of Joseph Campbell” edition, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words is both an introduction to the major work of Joyce and a representative portrait of Joseph Campbell as a critic of Joyce. It is also a major contribution to Joyce criticism, the fruit of a lifetime’s meditation on the great Irish writer’s works. Both Campbell fans and James Joyce scholars and students will be eager to have this previously out-of-print edition in their Collected Works library as they celebrate the upcoming 100th anniversary, in 2004, of ‘Bloom’s Day,’ the day depicted in Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses.
About the Author Joseph Campbell is perhaps most responsible for bringing mythology to a mass audience. His works rank among the classics in mythology and literature: Hero with a Thousand Faces, the four-volume The Masks of God, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, and many others. Among his many awards, Campbell received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Contribution to Creative Literature and the 1985 Medal of Honor for Literature from the National Arts Club. A past president of the American Society for the Study of Religion, Campbell was professor emeritus at Sarah Lawrence College in New York until his death in 1987.
Edmund L. Epstein, editor, is a professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and has been working on Joyce for almost fifty years. He founded and edited the first James Joyce journal, The James Joyce Review, and has since produced three books and thirty articles on Joyce.
MYTHIC WORLD, MODERN WORDS Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce
Foreword by Phil Cousineau
Publication Date: March 12, 2004
ISBN: 1-57731-406-9
Price: $22.95, Hardcover
Pages: 320, 5.5 x 8.5" Published by New World Library
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