Word: joycean
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...Times and Spectator. He is a rugged, independent Christian humanist who confronts an age that has depersonalized and secularized his values. Such novels as The Doctor Is Sick, Devil of a State and A Clockwork Orange are not only cautionary satires but examples of Burgess's flair for Joycean wordplay and knack for turning out novels that entertain as well as instruct...
...question have been around since the early '30s, when Sidney Joseph Perelman first began publishing his superbly crafted hilarity in the pages of The New Yorker. The magazine's readers soon developed a tart tooth for Perelman's brand of satire, a mix of burlesque and Joycean wordplay boldly colored by a fastidious disdain for the fake, the tawdry and the pompous. Even the titles of Perelman's "bits of embroidery," as he called his pieces, set new boundaries for comic absurdity: Somewhere a Roscoe; Beat Me, Post-Impressionist Daddy; Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Enough...
Barth knows. No novel has displayed such an elaborate Maginot Line of prepared defenses since Joyce had Stuart Gilbert write a whole book under his "supervision" to explicate Ulysses. Barth demands that Joycean parallel. You could spend a month, a year, maybe a life detecting patterns within patterns in Ulysses; at the end you might look back and wonder why you bothered, but at least you'd have met thousands of smart people along the way. You can spend the same time with Letters and find equally pleasing patterns, but then look over your shoulder and your only company...
...Boyles' intense awareness of themselves as an embattled entity have shaped the people that we see before us. Not for the good, necessarily. O'Casey had as sharp an eye as James Joyce for the foibles of his race, though it sometimes brimmed with an un-Joycean compassion. He knew the perils of being priest-ridden, the curse of drink, the terrible gift of hurting one another that has remained constant from the 1916 "Troubles" to the present sad day. Yet he set it all down to the ineffable music of English that rarely sounds sweeter than...
...However, this is a muted Mostel, and somehow he is not enough. Whether the problem lies in trying to capture Joyce onstage or in Burgess Meredith's direction, there are long moments of curious lifelessness, a kind of listless anarchy, the stage business often as flyaway as the Joycean allusions...