Catherine Flynn celebrating the release of "James Joyce and the Matter of Paris," published by Cambridge University Press, in conversation with fellow UC Berkeley professor Kent Puckett.

In James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, Catherine Flynn recovers the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity as the foundational context of Joyce's imaginative consciousness. Beginning with Joyce's underexamined first exile in 1902–03, she shows the significance for his writing of the time he spent in Paris and of a range of French authors whose works inflected his experience of that city. In response to the pressures of Parisian consumer capitalism, Joyce drew on French literature to conceive a somatic aesthetic, in which the philosophically disparaged senses of taste, touch, and smell as well as the porous, digestive body resist capitalism's efforts to manage and instrumentalize desire. This book re-situates the most canonical of Irish modernists in a European avant-garde context while revealing important links between Anglophone modernism and critical theory.

Catherine Flynn works on British and Irish modernist literature in a European avant-garde context. She joined the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley in 2012. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Introduction to the Humanities Program from 2009 to 2012. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 2009 and her B.A. in English and Philosophy from University College Cork in 2000. Previously, she practiced as an architect in Ireland and in Vienna, Austria; she has a B.Arch from University College Dublin. She is an Affiliate of the Program in Critical Theory and currently also serves as Director of Berkeley Connect in English and as Associate Director of Irish Studies.