Joycean Minimalism, Derridean Maximalism

Offers new perspectives on two key figures of modernity: James Joyce and Jacques Derrida

• Offers an analysis of maximalism and minimalism as a history of aesthetics, situating their historical theorisation within a modernist genealogy of Joyce and Beckett
• Reads Joyce within the context of minimalism, challenging the prevailing critical paradigm of Joyce as maximalist writer
• Argues that modernist minimalism has been received as correlate to the inquiry into self-presence in modernity, but that Joyce occupies a continuum with Beckett in this mutual inquiry

This book presents two major critical reorientations, developing new positions on James Joyce and Jacques Derrida by reading them together within a shared modernity. It places these readings in relation to each other through a conceptual history of maximalism and minimalism, situating literature, philosophy and the history of aesthetics within the context of the closure of metaphysics. Through this revised reading of Joyce, Joycean Minimalism, Derridean Maximalism resituates the reception and periodisation of modernism. It also argues that the configuration of modernism and deconstruction it develops demonstrates a shared austerity – one that is located in a mutual philosophical inquiry into self-presence between literature and deconstruction. Overall, Maria-Daniella Dick highlights the contemporaneity of deconstruction in the age of postcritique.