This study is an examination of the beast motif associated with Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses. The motif has its origins in Joyce's earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Ulysses the beast motif is related to Stephen's feelings of guilt and remorse over his mother's death and includes characterizations of Stephen as a fox, a dog, a rat, and a vampire. The motif consistently carries a negative connotation. Several literary sources for the imagery of the beast motif are apparent in Ulysses, including two plays by John Webster, a poem by Matthew Prior, medieval bestiaries, and a traditional Irish folk riddle. The study of the continuity of the beast motif in Ulysses helps to explain the complex characterization of Stephen Dedalus.

This thesis argues that the popular characterization of high modernist fiction as esoteric, elitist, uncommunicative, and far too difficult for the common reader obscures the democratic principles at the heart of modernist experimentation and its poetics of difficulty. Recent theories of embodied cognition when applied to representative examples of high modernist novels help dispel the myth of inaccessibility and reveal the many ways in which these works actually accommodate the common reader. Once the stigma of inaccessibility is removed from the study of modernist novels, it becomes possible to see how their formal experiments with language as well as the themes and issues they contain operate for readers and writers alike as a means of exploring everyday cognitive activities and responses. To this end, the concept of cognitive dissonance provides a heuristic device for understanding what lies behind the motivations of writers who aestheticise experiences of dissonance in their texts and the responses of readers who confront these texts. This cognitive approach to modern literature challenges assumptions about high modernism's "uncompromising intellectuality" and replaces them with a view of modernism that is more accessible and inclusive without diminishing its radical difficulty. It also paves the way for new readings of highly canonical modernist fiction. For instance, I examine how James Joyce places "inscribed" readers into Ulysses to guide actual readers through some of the difficulties of the novel. I then read William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as a novel that both thematises and formally resists the modern threat of behaviouristic human conditioning. Finally, I look at how the theme and form of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway reinforce the embodied equation of dissonance with illness and incompletion.

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by Kung Siu Bing. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-121). / Abstract and appendix in English and Chinese. / by Kung Siu Bing. / Abstract --- p.iii / Acknowledgement --- p.v / Abbreviations used for the four literary works --- p.vi / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Femininity and Masculinity --- p.14 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Androgyny --- p.51 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- Sex，Gender and Sexual Identity --- p.80 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- Multiple Selves --- p.102 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- Conclusion --- p.112 / Works Cited --- p.114 / Appendix I Chinese version of quotations of Shuang Shen --- p.122 / Appendix II Table of major characters of Shuang Shen and The Illusionist --- p.126

L’écriture joycienne se distingue par la conscience aiguë dont elle témoigne de l’histoire des mots. Cette tendance est le produit de l’émergence de la grammaire comparée et de la sémantique historique au XIXe siècle, disciplines qui avaient bouleversé le concept d’étymologie et légitimé, en apparence, la prise en compte du passé de la langue dans son emploi. Pourtant, quand Joyce écrit, cette approche est irrémédiablement dépassée, et ses nombreuses contradictions critiquées. Aussi les œuvres de l’écrivain, loin de constituer un reflet fidèle et stable du discours sur l’étymologie du siècle où il naquit, en mettent-elles à nu les paradoxes et les partis pris. La stratégie d’écriture de Dubliners, si elle repose sur une exploitation fréquente des données mises au jour par les comparatistes et les sémanticiens, prend ainsi le contrepied de toute démarche transcendantale et tire profit de la nature subjective et aléatoire de l’activation des potentialités étymologiques des mots par le lecteur. La volonté affichée par Stephen dans A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man de trouver une justesse supérieure dans la motivation directe puis indirecte des noms fait place, dans le roman suivant, à un rejet amer de « l’imposture des sons ». Mais Ulysses éclaire également les failles des théories linguistiques de son époque : sa mise en lumière du rôle joué par l’étymologie populaire dans le fonctionnement de la langue implique une critique du positivisme saussurien et s’inscrit dans une dénonciation plus large de toute conception pseudo-rationnelle et supra-individuelle de l’histoire. / One of the hallmarks of Joyce’s prose is the acute consciousness it reflects of the history of words. This tendency is the product of the emergence of comparative linguistics and historical semantics in the 19th century, both of which had revolutionized the concept of etymology and seemed to make the history of words relevant to their use. Yet that approach soon became irremediably outdated and its numerous contradictions had been subjected to severe criticism by the time Joyce wrote his books. Accordingly, his works, far from giving a faithful and stable image of the etymological discourse prevalent in the century of his birth, reflect its biases and contradictions. Although the writing strategy of Dubliners relies on a constant exploitation of the data unveiled by linguists, it opposes any transcendental philosophy and makes much of the subjective and random nature of the activation of words’ etymological potentialities by the reader. Stephen’s attempts at finding a superior meaning in the direct and then indirect motivation of names in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man evolves, in the next novel, into a bitter rejection of the “imposture of sounds”. Ulysses, however, also brings into relief the inconsistencies of the linguistic theories of its own time: in highlighting the role played by folk etymology in the use of language, it constitutes an implicit criticism of Saussure’s positivist claims and calls into question any pseudo-rational and supra-individual conception of history.

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This dissertation situates literary modernism in the context of a nascent form of globalization. Before it could be fully acknowledged global encroachment was, by virtue of its novelty, repeatedly experienced as a kind of shattering or disintegration. Through an examination of three modernist novels, I argue that a general modernist preoccupation with space both expresses and occludes anxieties over a globe which suddenly seemed to be too small and too undifferentiated. Building upon recent critical work that has begun to historicize modernist understandings of space, I address the as yet under-appreciated ways in which globalism and its discontents informed all of the locales that modernist fictions variously inhabited. For Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, the responses to global change were as diverse as the spaces through which they were inflected. / I begin by identifying a modernist predilection for spatial metaphors. This rhetorical touchstone has, from New Criticism onward, been so sedimented within critical responses to the era that modernism's interest in global space has itself frequently been diminished. In my readings of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Joyce's Ulysses, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse, I argue that the signs of globalization are ubiquitous across modernism. As Conrad repeats and contests New Imperialist constructions of Africa as a vanishing space, that continent becomes the stage for his anxieties over a newly diminished globe. For Joyce, Dublin's conflicted status as both provincial capital and colonial metropolis makes that city the perfect site in which to worry over those recent world-wide developments. Finally, I argue that for Woolf, it is the domestic space which serves best to register and resist the ominous signs of global incursion. In conclusion, I suggest that modernism's anticipatory attention to globalization makes the putative break between that earlier era and postmodernity---itself often predicated upon spatial compression---all the more difficult to maintain.

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