SOURCE: Hitchcock, Peter. “Answering as Authoring: or, Marxism's Joyce.” Mosaic 32, no. 1 (March 1999): 55-69.

In the following essay, Hitchcock draws a parallel between various crises in the development of Marxist thought and its ongoing interpretations of James Joyce's work, noting that Marxist critics have ignored Joyce's own positions in his writing in favor of discussions regarding the political agenda of his work.

Marxist literary criticism has always occupied a somewhat Janus-faced position between aesthetic and social-science concerns—never hesitant to proclaim the idealism of the one while steadfast in its resistance to the material certitudes of the other. This tension between the imaginary and the real remains a hallmark of materialist analysis, but one that is overdetermined by the vicissitudes of history. Indeed, it is history that gives the lie to any univocality in Marxist critique and shows instead that the hard line, or the party line, was ever...