Joyce Pays, Joyspace (Or Joyce And Space): An Introduction

If at the beginning of the Twentieth Century the idea of identity and selfhood was mainly considered as rooted in temporality, in the 1970s the ‘spatial turn’ spearheaded by Henry Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Michel De Certeau represented a paradigm shift in social and humanities theory that dispersed the traditional privileging of time over space. The spatial condition of human existence acquired again a profound relevance and produced changes in the relationship between place, body, mind, memories and emotions. In Joyce’s novels space and places are constituted, perceived, known, and lived in their physical, social, memorial, textual, cognitive, political, imaginative, or cerebral dimension. Such perceptions – real or imaginary, conscious or unaware – contribute to building the identities of places and of individuals, in a continuous exchange between subjective and objective, between embodied mind and places.