Margot Norris

Picture of Margot Norris
Chancellor's Professor Emerita of English
School of Humanities
Chancellor's Professor of Comparative Literature
School of Humanities
Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo
Phone: (949) 824-7443
Fax: (949) 824-2916
Email: mnorris@uci.edu
University of California, Irvine
409 Humanities Instructional Bldg
Mail Code: 2650
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Modernism; James Joyce; Literature and Other Arts; Literature and War; Feminist and Gender Studies; Literature and Philosophy
Research Abstract
Although my field is Modernism—both Anglo-American and Continental—I increasingly see myself as a specialist in twentieth century literature, art, and culture. My 2000 book, titled Writing War in the Twentieth Century was published by the University Press of Virginia and contains chapters on a range of writing about mass warfare in the 20th century—including both World Wars, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf War. This work grew out of an earlier book on the changing relations of the human to the animal and to the body in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century titled Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence, which was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1985.

However, my most sustained and devoted interest over the course of my entire career has been the work of James Joyce. My love for Joyce began with the study of Finnegans Wake and resulted in The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (Johns Hopkins, 1976). I eventually extended my interest to all of Joyce’s work in Joyce’s Web (Texas, 1992). In the last few years I have produced two new books on James Joyce. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's 'Dubliners' was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2003, and Cork University Press in 2004 printed my monograph on the 1967 Joseph Strick film of Joyce's Ulysses. I have also edited the Norton Critical Edition of Joyce's Dubliners, published in 2006. Can you tell that I think James Joyce's stories and novels are the greatest on the planet!
Publications
A Norton Critical Edition: James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’. Edited by Margot Norris. 2006.
Ulysses.Cork: Cork University Press, 2004. (This study of Joseph Strick's film of Joyce's Ulysses is part of the series Ireland into Film.
Suspicious Readings of Joyce's 'Dubliners' University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Writing War in the Twentieth Century. UP of Virginia, 2000

Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism. U of Texas P, 1992

Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence. Johns Hopkins, 1985

The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake. Johns Hopkins UP, 1976
A Companion to James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. Bedford Books, 1998
"Death by Speculation: Deconstructing The House of Mirth." The House of Mirth. Ed. Shari Benstock. Bedford Books, 1994

"The 'Wife' and the 'Genius': Domesticating Modern Art in Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas." Modernism, Gender, and Culture. Ed. Lisa Rado. Garland Publishing, 1997

"Modernism and Vietnam: Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now." Modern Fiction Studies. (1998)

"Dividing the Indivisible: The Fissured Story of the Manhattan Project." Cultural Critique. (Winter 1996-7)
Professional Societies
President of the International James Joyce Foundation, 2004-2008
Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters (Appointed 2008)
Research Centers
Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy November 2006
Last updated
10/08/2013