In browsing the contents of this book, my first thought was, “Well, sure, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Or, more cryptically to those in earshot, I uttered, “Well, sure, once you've made it through Ulysses everything can sound like Joyce.” But the joy and mental workout of All Future Plunges come not from nitpicking particular Joycean tropes or images but rather from considering Joyce as a cultural phenomenon for all who followed to engage with, immerse themselves in, (...) and speak to. His works anchor Vergara's five case studies in twentieth-and twenty-first-century Russian literature (Olesha, Nabokov, Bitov, Sokolov, and Shishkin). Joyce is deployed as a source of intertexts and influences and as the lens through which the Russian works are read. Vergara includes “points of contact” for each author to show knowledge of Joyce as well as the context in which Joyce was being read and discussed in Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet literary spheres. The framing work on intertextuality is significant in its own right and leads to compelling notions of how literary influences can be detected and discussed. Behind it all looms the bespectacled presence of Joyce (gazing out from the book's cover in pop-art primary colors) with his Oedipal tensions, modern epic style, bawdy language, and sonorous prose. But essentially what Vergara's book gives us is a glimpse of creative and smart people reading the work of another creative smart person.Vladimir Nabokov, an outspoken devotee of Joyce, had a peculiar rationale for not believing in heaven. He wrote that even if, in the afterlife, he found himself in paradise surrounded by all of his dead loved ones, he would not be able to shake the gnawing doubt that at any point these beloved phantoms might pull off their masks and reveal themselves to be demons. After reading All Future Plunges, a similar fear may grip the reader of modernist literature—that the many varied and nuanced references we find in these works may one day all prove to be simply myriad instantiations of Joyce in disguise. But even when that happens, I suppose we may still think to call it heaven. (shrink)

In recent years, poetry and videogames have begun talking to one another in earnest. Poets have found inspiration in digital-interactive landscapes, while game developers now look to poetry as a source of textual enrichment. This book examines the p.