PhD,
Western
Ontario
MA,
Western
Ontario
BA,
Manitoba
Extension:
32759
Office:
HH
264
Email:
mmcarthu@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
I was born in Winnipeg in 1953 and was educated at Churchill High School and the University of Manitoba. After several years working (and skiing) throughout Western and Arctic Canada, I started graduate school at Concordia University in 1977 and completed my PhD at Western in 1985. I luckily started my PhD at the same time as Parisian theory and new textual approaches to Modernism arrived, and I happily combined both in my dissertation and first book, an influence study of William Blake and James Joyce (1988). I joined the faculty at Waterloo in 1986, and I have been Undergraduate Chair (1993-1996) and Chair (1996-2004) in this Department. In 1993, I taught at the Université Canadienne en France in Nice, and I regularly attend Joyce conferences in Europe and North America. I am married with two daughters. I am an avid gardener, traveler, and football and hockey fan.
Selected publications
“Replication and Narration: ‘Counterparts’ as a Replicon of Joycean Narration.” Joyce Studies Annual 2013, 95-113.
“Symptom and Sign: Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, and the Literary Mandate of Laughter.” Twentieth-Century Literature 56.1 (Spring 2010), 1-24.
Editor, with Shelley Hulan and Randy Allen Harris. Literature, Rhetoric and Values: Selected Proceedings of a Conference held at the University of Waterloo, 3-5 June 2011. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.
"The Index Nothing Affirmeth: The Semiotic Formation of a Literary Mandate in Joyce’s 'The Sisters'." James Joyce Quarterly. 45.2 (2008), 115-32.
"Giacomo Joyce, Ezra Pound, Jacques Derrida, and the Image of the Artist." In Giacomo Joyce: Envoys of the Other. Ed. Louis Armand, Clare Wallace. Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, 2002. 56-79; rpt. Prague: Charles University Press, 2006.
"The Origin of the Work of Art in Portrait V." In Images of Joyce, Volume Two. Ed. Clive Hart, C. George Sandalescu, Bonnie Kim Scott, Fritz Senn. London: Colin Smyth, 1998. 450-64.
"The Example of Joyce: Derrida Reading Joyce." James Joyce Quarterly 32.2 (1995), 227-41.
"Deciphering Eliot: 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' and the Dialectic of the Cipher." American Literature 66.3 (1994), 509-24.
"Herman Rapaport, Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Language. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 1989." Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry. 12.1-2 (1992), 275-282.
Stolen Writings: Blake's Milton, Joyce's Ulysses, and the Nature of Influence. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988.
"Rose of Castille/Rows of Cast Steel: Figural Parallelism in Ulysses." James Joyce Quarterly 24.4 (1987), 411-22.
"'Signs on a White Field': Semiotics and Forgery in the 'Proteus' Chapter of Ulysses." ELH 53.3 (1986), 633-52.
Current research
My current research has followed two parallel paths: the intertextual and genetic relation between Homer’s The Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses; the genetic history of the making of Eliot’s The Waste Land. I combined these two paths in my latest article “Paris, January 1922: Towards the last month of Ulysses and The Waste Land” (currently under review), in which I examined the parallels between the last year of the seven-year composition of Ulysses in 1921 and the composition of The Waste Land from January to December 1921. My primary focus was on January 1922, when Joyce and Eliot, working several blocks away from each other in Paris, brought these two Modernist masterpieces to conclusion through very different though parallel strategies.