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This thesis is concerned with engaging a critic who has been neglected by his peers in the field of Joyce studies for more than forty years. This critic, Joseph Campbell, is an American scholar more popularly known for his studies in myth. However, he began his intellectual career contributing to a subject that emerged in the early years of the critical reception of Finnegans Wake: that the dream depicted in Joyce???s final masterpiece is dependent on a Dreamer. The neglect Campbell???s work has endured is largely due, this thesis argues, to an inaccurate treatment of his reading of this dream figure. This inaccuracy largely stems from a critic, Clive Hart, who engages with the debate of the Dreamer as an introductory means to demonstrating the ???structural??? theories involved in the Wake. As a minor feature of Hart???s analysis, Campbell???s theory of the Dreamer is identified with another method, one belonging to a fellow American Joycean, Edmund Wilson, a method incongruent with Campbell theories of dream consciousness. Subsequently, Campbell remains an undeveloped scholar within Joyce criticism. To counter Hart???s inaccurate depiction of Campbell, this thesis argues that there is provision in early scholarship to re-evaluate Campbell???s theory of the Dreamer in more developed terms. In this respect, the thesis is divided up into three sections. The first section is a literary review of this early scholarship, demonstrating certain influential strains of thought equivalent to Campbell???s ???metaphoric??? concept of the Dreamer, one that contrasts with the rigid, ???literal??? ideas his work is predominantly identified. The second section examines Campbell???s account in detail and the specific criticism it drew from Hart. Finally, the third section argues that Campbell???s interpretation of the Dreamer is best engaged through an archetypal account of the Dreamer, one that regards the symbols encountered in the Wake through the ???guiding??? features of a mythological concept of the psyche sensitive to the reflexive tendencies of the dream portrayed, Campbell???s ???cosmogonic cycle???.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

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Although the letter purports to represent fact, it cannot avoid having a partly or potentially fictive status, turning as it does on the complex interplay between the real and the imagined. Consequently, the main critical approach of this paper is to consider the interactions between conflicting modes of expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary fiction. The rhetorical and conceptual contrarieties that I examine are broadly characterized by the contradiction between the implied spontaneity of the familiar letter and the inevitable artifice of its form. Working with familiar letters by four writers between the years 1740 and 1825, I specifically address various narrative patterns by which each turns to the act of communication to draw upon the experience of an isolated self. Against a background which explores the main developments in epistolary fiction and a historical progression of the uses and significance of letter-writing, I investigate epistolary texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Hazlitt. In turning to letters by each author, I explore the literary, theoretical and especially the psychological implications of the tenuous divisions between fact and fiction. In particular, my analysis stresses that letter-writing is an authorial act in which writing about the self can be understood as a literary form of self-portraiture or creative expression. / I examine this claim---and the metaphors defining it---in two ways. First, by focusing on selected letters, I foreground each writer's language as an agent of internal conflict. In so doing, I am able to formulate distinctive questions regarding the potential of epistolary narratives to transform emotional or psychological schisms into fictions which become explicitly creative texts. Secondly, I analyze the changing nature of the fictions which emerge through this process. My findings conclude that authors' letters must be read, at least very often, as a constituent part of their literary work and as interpretive models of a shifting dynamic of psychological expression.

This thesis argues that the interface between human and machine has been an important system of metaphors since the beginning of the twentieth century in North American science fiction (SF) and nonfictional writings. In examining these texts, this study intends to discuss positions and responses regarding technological developments and the social and political experiences underlying it In my parallel analyses of fictional (SF) and nonfictional (philosophical, scientific, theoretical) texts. I wish to signal similarities and differences among the two fields. In different ways, the treatments of cyborgs and cyberspace in both nonfiction and SF have addressed, through these metaphors, notions of mass culture, democracy, as well as individual and collective agency and subjectivity. I also argue that these critical strategies are best understood as the strategies of two social groups---one, of them in a dominant position (that of a professional, mainly technocratic class) and one in an ambivalently marginal position (that of the readers of a mass genre such as SF). In nonfictional writings, the strategy is as a rule one of either uncritical embrace of the present state of affairs, or a specular one of utter rejection, with the only exceptions emerging from contemporary feminism. In SF, attitudes of both consensus and problematization emerge. Thus, my study also calls for a qualification of claims about "postmodernity" as the privileged period in which technology acquires center stage. My first two chapters foreground some theoretical concepts and issues related to both the study of mass culture and of the SF genre. The next three chapters focus on specific texts about the instrumental body and of the virtual frontier, and on the critical responses (by women, and by dissenting male figures) to them. The conclusion stresses the notions of democracy allegorically presented in these texts.