The object of this study is to discover whether Joyce's many allusions to events and personages from Ireland's history and mythology are incidental to the main narrative of Finnegans Wake, or whether they serve an intrinsic thematic and structural function. Chapter 2 examines the general theories which underlie Joyce's use of the past in his novel. From Vico he derived his conception of the cyclical progress of history, and from Bruno a notion of conflict based on the confrontation of opposites. In the writings of Quinet Joyce discovered a metaphor for recurrence in the image of flowers which continue to flourish regardless of the rise and fall of civilizations. These general concepts found in Irish dimension in the work of Stefan Czarnowski. He examined the process of mythologization by which St. Patrick became absorbed into the cultural mould of the earlier Celtic heroes, and provided a parallel for Joyce's identification of his characters which corresponding figures in the past. Furthermore, Czarnowski's concept of provisional death, in which heroes were preserved by a commemorative rites, reinforces the significance of the wake as a symbol of the hope of renewal. Joyce began work on Finnegans Wake by isolating certain themes from Ireland's past, and incorporating them into the fictional frame-work of six preliminary sketches. These sketches are studied in their earliest and final forms in chapter 3. The figures of Rodrick O'Connor, Tristan and Isolde. Kevin, Bishop Berkely and Patrick are the focus of the first four, while the theme of invasion is prominent in "Nannelujo", and the relationship of subjugated people to a conqueror in "Here Comes Everybody." By tracing the original themes to their inclusion in Finnegans Wake Joyce's treatment of his subjects is seen to develop from a mood of simple parody towards the juxtaposition of a multiplicity of parallel themes. The main emphasis of the novel went beyond the initial interest in history, as the concerns revealed by the isolation of themes from the past were developed in a fictional framework designed to be archetypal and representative, rather than historical and particular. Chapter 4 examines the relationship that Joyce set up between the brothers Shem and Shaun and their past. First as Mutt and Jute and later as Muta and Juva, they observe respectively the Battle of Ciontarf and the confrontation of the Archdruid and Patrick. Throughout the novel the oppositions of Shem and Shaun are frequently given an Irish dimension. Furthermore, in the chapters of Finnegans Wake devoted to Shaun, he adopts many attitudes associated with an insular Irish point of view. As Shaun the post, he is associated with Victorious, the messenger sent by the people of Ireland in a time of crisis to recall St. Patrick. Shaun does not succeed in his mission, but dreams of usurping Patrick's position himself. He is also the adovcace of violent means to achieve national aspirations, and, through his slogans are popular, they are also suspect. HCE himself, therefore, is forced to rise from his slumbers to propose an alternative, more tolerant, prospect from Ireland. Joyce's depiction of HCE has a consistent Irish dimension, studied in chapter 5. He is shown as an outsider, associated with the many invaders of Ireland, whose wider view of reality enables him to point a new way forward. He is the founder of a city culture, which object of suspicien for many. His roles include not only the hero Finn and Saint Patrick, but also Parnell, whose personality deeply divided the country. The lose of public confidence, which paralyses HCE's creativity, is expressed in Finnegans Wake by the image of the grave, in which HCE must sleep in the state of provisional death, awaiting the popular acceptance of a broad concept of national-hood, and the establishment of a new era by mutual consent. The themes which intersected Joyce at the outset of his novel developed through his adaptation of ideas gleaned from Vico, Bruno and Czarnowski into a theory of history which re-enacts conflict as part of its onward progression, but in which reconciliation is the necessary prerequisite for the institution of each new era. This theory influenced his selection of events from Irish history, which become a model for the parallel operation of recurrence in world history. Irish history, therefore, is a sustained level of significance in Finnegans Wake, absorbed into the novel's structure, and providing a wealth of detail to illustrate its thematic concerns. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

The remarkable challenges Finnegans Wake offers to its readers and to the very process of reading are the results of an evolution of Nonsense literature. Despite the unduly "serious" framework of criticism which has been built up around it, Joyce's anomalous last work is a radical "hoax" upon interpretation. The regular confluences of linguistic deconstruction (via word association as well as recurring word and phrase matrices) and ontological metaphor, developed from authors such as Rabelais, Sterne, and Lewis Carroll, are offered by the Wake as tests to the reader's (qua reader) sensibilities. As Nonsense, Finnegans Wake departs from typified modernist modus operandi (metonymic allusion) and instead explores the limits of metaphor. The stakes of Joyce's hoax are of vital interest to the contemporary student of literature and culture, since the Wake dares the reader to find new meanings rather than to project old ones; to exult its eccentricities and its difference; and all the while to call into question (as the text itself does), its authenticity and authority.

This dissertation considers Finnegans Wake as a deconstructive writing that exemplifies many of the textual operations that the French critical theorist Jacques Derrida attempts to define through his use of such "undecidable" terms and "non-concepts" as "difference," "dissemination," "trace," and "grafting." It argues that the Wake operates much like the "bifurcated writing" and "grouped textual field" that Derrida identifies as the only possible site for a deconstructive engagement of the terms and concepts of the Western metaphysical tradition, the tradition that Derrida terms phallogocentrism. The Wake has been an important text in the critical formulations of many contemporary theorists, and, as Derrida has recently acknowledged, his own theories of dissemination and deconstruction have been considerably affected by the Wake during the twenty-five to thirty years that he has been learning to read it. In drawing on Derrida's theories to analyze the Wake, this dissertation utilizes Derrida's terms to "re-mark" in Joyce's text, the disseminative textual operations that Derrida has marked as operative in the texts of the history of philosophy and in "so-called literary" texts like Finnegan’s Wake. In a certain sense, it renders unto Joyce's text that which has always already belonged to it. Drawing on Derrida's investigation of speech and writing, the dissertation considers the Wake's identification of itself as a fusion of speech and writing that requires a "speechreading" on the part of its readers. It supports this consideration by employing Umberto Eco's semiotic methodology to trace the network of metonymic lexemes by which the Wake identifies itself as a writing for the ear as well as the eye. Next it analyzes the Wake's tenth chapter as a chapter that exploits the formula 1+2+3+4=10 and produces a writing that operates as an arithmetical textual machine which problematizes the traditional concepts of presence and being and which also works towards dislodging the phallogocentric organization of writing with such hierarchically organized binary terms as male/female and central/marginal. In order to illustrate how the Wake disseminatively disrupts the binary terms by which phallogocentrism dominates thought, speech, and writing, the dissertation also considers how Joyce's text functions in an Intertextual relationship with some of the writings of Blake and Shakespeare. It does this by analyzing how the Wake dismantles some of the philosophical paradigms operating in the Blake and Shakespeare texts and takes important signifiers from those texts in order to set them to work as signifiers of signifieds that are radically different from those in the texts of Blake and Shakespeare. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

No description available.

Este trabalho discute as implicações do tempo na História, da História no romance e do romance nas vanguardas; trata da crise do romance no início do século XX e da ascensão das vanguardas; relaciona essa crise com a crise do racionalismo que resultará em obras de arte complexas como o livro Finnegans Wake de James Joyce, um livro considerado por muitos como ilegível e que não poderia ser traduzido. Este trabalho considera também que para se traduzir uma obra Finnegans Wake seria necessário, mais do que uma técnica, uma estética da tradução. Partindo de uma estética da tradução, elaboramos um critério específico para a tradução de Finnegans Wake, a qual apresentamos ao final deste trabalho, acompanhada de notas e de um glossário dos termos usados no original e na tradução. / This thesis deals with the implications of time in History, History in the novel, and with the novel in the avant gardes. It also examines the crisis of the novel at the beginning of 20th century and the rise of the avant gardes, and relates this crisis to the crisis of rationalism that would result in complex works of art such as Finnegans Wake, believed by many to be unreadable and untranslatable. It then proposes that in order to translate Finnegans Wake a whole aesthetics of translation is necessary in order to express the complex workmanship involved in its creation. Bearing in mind this aesthetics of translation, the thesis then elaborates a specific criterion to translate Finnegans Wake, which is presented in the final section, followed by notes and a glossary of original and translated terms.

Este trabalho discute as implicações do tempo na História, da História no romance e do romance nas vanguardas; trata da crise do romance no início do século XX e da ascensão das vanguardas; relaciona essa crise com a crise do racionalismo que resultará em obras de arte complexas como o livro Finnegans Wake de James Joyce, um livro considerado por muitos como ilegível e que não poderia ser traduzido. Este trabalho considera também que para se traduzir uma obra Finnegans Wake seria necessário, mais do que uma técnica, uma estética da tradução. Partindo de uma estética da tradução, elaboramos um critério específico para a tradução de Finnegans Wake, a qual apresentamos ao final deste trabalho, acompanhada de notas e de um glossário dos termos usados no original e na tradução. / This thesis deals with the implications of time in History, History in the novel, and with the novel in the avant gardes. It also examines the crisis of the novel at the beginning of 20th century and the rise of the avant gardes, and relates this crisis to the crisis of rationalism that would result in complex works of art such as Finnegans Wake, believed by many to be unreadable and untranslatable. It then proposes that in order to translate Finnegans Wake a whole aesthetics of translation is necessary in order to express the complex workmanship involved in its creation. Bearing in mind this aesthetics of translation, the thesis then elaborates a specific criterion to translate Finnegans Wake, which is presented in the final section, followed by notes and a glossary of original and translated terms.

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is known as one of the most difficult texts in all of literature. A one-to-one relationship, however, between a decoding reader and a presenting author is something Finnegans Wake does not incorporate in any traditional sense. Because of the ways in which Joyce manipulates language through assonance and multilingual references, his words are essentially freed from their dictionary definitions and rely instead on connotations. This essay looks at the text from the perspective of a first reading, a look that is then compared to a more 'authoritative' stance found in various glossaries, to see if the information found there takes precedence over the reader's imagination, and if self-made meanings remain 'appropriate' in the face of the explanations. The text is shown to become more of a device with which we produce meaning, rather than a story to which we are only passively listening or otherwise trying to understand. Instead, it celebrates obscure, often contradicting sense relations, which correspond to the dream-like nature of its nocturnal theme. Despite the sheer amount of historical references contained within, the first-time reader can proceed without the many glossaries that have been written on the work, and instead rely on a more creative and less disciplined method of examination. This essay is thus tainted with an inherent contradiction—it questions the transcriptive act epitomized by eager textual scholars set on elucidating the text's difficulties while simultaneously committing that act, but only in order to encourage readers that Finnegans Wake otherwise scares away and to suggest an alternate method of reading. Readers are thereby asked to relieve themselves of their domesticated behavior, and get involved. The difficulty of Finnegans Wake only appears when we read it in terms of conventional understanding, and should instead encourage us into becoming creative users.

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???.