Inductive Scrutinies gathers some of Fritz Senn's major essays of the last ten years. Based principally on Ulysses, they display anew his regard for Joyce's text in all its detail. The selection does not attempt a broad overview of Senn's writing, nor is it organized around a single theme: rather it is meant to show his lifelong interest in the workings of language — its limitations, disruptive energies, its allusive potential within and beyond a single work. In particular it demonstrates continuing concern with the problems of annotation as well as with the reader's pleasurable and active participation. In the editor's words, 'His chosen playground is Joyce as something written, to be scrutinized with dedication. An extraordinary familiarity with the text underlies his response, and his imaginative and nimble explorations always start with and return to Joyce's word.'
'There is no doubt in my mind that Fritz Senn is not only the best living Joyce critic but probably the best Joyce has ever had.'
— Hugh Kenner
'In Senn's practice, to echo Goethe, there is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory 'Inductive Scrutinies is a dissectors delight, full of stylishly presented crucial insights and philological 'titbits'.'
— Laurent Milesci, James Joyce Broadsheet
Contents:
Introductory Scrutinies: Focus on Senn
Instead of a Preface: The Creed
Joyce the Verb
Joycean Provections
In Quest of a nisus formativus Joyceanus
Anagnostic Probes
Sequential Close-Ups in Joyce's Ulysses
Remodelling Homer
Protean Inglossabilities: 'To No End Gathered'
'All Kinds of Words Changing Colour': Lexical Clashes in 'Eumaeus'
Eumaean Titbits — As Someone Somewhere Sings
In Classical Idiom: anthologia intertextualis
Beyond the Lexicographer's Reach: Literary Overdetermination
Linguistic Dissatisfaction at the Wake.
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