SOURCE: Reizbaum, Marilyn. “The Minor Work of James Joyce.” James Joyce Quarterly 30, no. 2 (winter 1993): 177-89.

In this essay, Reizbaum regards Joyce as a minor writer in the sense that his work is resistant to easy classification and interpretation.

In a way we've been saying it for years—Joyce is a minor writer. Perhaps it is presumptuous to implicate anyone but myself in this provocative claim—provocative, at the very least, because the work seems demoted or devalued through what could be read simply as a traditional association with the idea of minor; but though I may be among only a few prepared to use the terminology, many of the, in particular, recent readers/critics of Joyce, I would argue, have been meaning what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and a succession of others have been saying when they speak of a “minor literature.” When we speak of...