Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900
|
Buy Now
James Joyce's Negations - Irony, Indeterminacy and Nihilism in "Ulysses" and Other Writings (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,435
Discovery Miles 14 350
|
|
James Joyce's Negations - Irony, Indeterminacy and Nihilism in "Ulysses" and Other Writings (Hardcover)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
The main purpose of this book is to validate a reading of Joyce in
negative terms. Central to the enquiry is an examination of the
roles of irony and of indeterminacy. Irony, interpreted in
metaphysical rather than merely rhetorical terms, is envisaged as
deriving from two separate if related orientations, one associated
with Friedrich Schlegel, the other with Gustave Flaubert. Insofar
as Joyce's work (including "Ulysses") owes more to the latter than
the former, it forgoes the genial humour central to Schlegel's
theories, and embraces instead the ironic detachment and formal
control of a Flaubertian perspective. Such irony (which entails a
suspicion of sentiment and a related dehumanisation of character,
as in some of the stories in Dubliners) becomes normative in Joyce,
and along with a similarly deflationary parody pervades "Ulysses".
In addition, a persistent indeterminacy is established as early as
'The Dead', so that it becomes impossible in that story to
adjudicate between not just contradictory but mutually exclusive
interpretations. Such indeterminacy is pushed to further extremes
in "Ulysses", with its notorious proliferation of narrative
perspectives. As a corollary to the work's encyclopaedic
inclusiveness and quotidian particularism, every detail tends to
assume the same significance as every other; the consequence being
that (in Gyorgy Lukacs' famous formulation) we lose all sense of
any 'hierarchy of meaning'. From that it is but a step to Franco
Moretti's assessment that in "Ulysses" everyday existence remains
'inert, opaque - meaningless', and that in fact the whole point is
to represent the meaningless precisely 'as meaningless'.
Indeterminacy, in effect, ushers in the possibility of nihilism.
The analysis of "Ulysses" culminates with the attempt (unavailing
in both cases) to discover in either Bloom or Molly a genuine
source of countervailing affirmation. The study concludes with a
brief consideration of the polysemic vocabulary of "Finnegans Wake"
as a logical extrapolation of the poetics of indeterminacy.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
You might also like..
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.