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.

Zugl.: London, School of Oriental and African Studies, Diss.

Thesis (Ph.D. (English)) - Rhodes University, 2009.

This thesis examines the relationship between the fiction of James Joyce and the theological practices outlined by Ignatius of Loyola. By deliberately foregoing claims of direct or simple influence, the thesis illustrates the way in which Loyola's concepts of belief, irony, discernment, and indifference illuminate the operations of the Joycean text. These operations in both Loyola and Joyce are themselves best explicated through the use of Kleinian psychoanalytic theory. Klein and her followers analyze dynamics of belief, representation, and meaning as products of frustration. Loyola and Joyce both force the reader into symmetrical situations of frustration, and Kleinian analysis helps us see how Joyce uses his texts as a kind of exercise for the reader-an exercise of productive frustration, disappointment, and loss. I trace the way this loss can turn reading into a reparative act, one that moves through the Kleinian 'paranoid-schizoid' position into a more productive, contingent, depressive position. I thus address Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's proposal for reparative reading. By examining both Loyola's and Joyce's engagement with (and invitations into) frustrating, paranoid reading, I show how this engagement might become reparative. The thesis begins with an analysis of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, finding there a specific structure of 'earnest irony.' It continues with a close reading of 'The Dead,' discerning how this structure operates in the Joycean text at the levels of both content and narration. It then takes up Kleinian theory directly to see precisely what paranoid reading-of the kind both Joyce and Loyola demand-accomplishes, and what its failure achieves. Its final two chapters consider A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where it finds the narrative apparatus forcing the reader into a particular form of productive frustration, and Ulysses, which requires the greatest form of 'earnest irony' from the reader.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / This essay will deal with an aspect that cannot be ignored nor go unnoticed when we read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Joyce's interest in the theme of religion, or the importance of religion in the development of the artist as a young man, according to Joyce.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / The general objective of this work is to analyze the work of James Joyce, specifically, the analysis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Cette étude a pour but premier de repenser la relation entre Dubliners et les mots « paralysis », « gnomon » et « simony » figurant dans le premier paragraphe de « The Sisters ». Dans la mesure où la critique les a abordés suivant divers actes de centralisation, dé-centralisation et re-centralisation du recueil de Joyce, le concept de rhizome, tel qu'exposé par Deleuze et Guattari dans Mille Plateaux, peut être un modèle pertinent pour présenter la variation des rapports de territorialité entre l’œuvre et ces trois mots. A l'issue de cette étude, ces derniers se voient attribuer des statuts successifs qui remettent en question la notion de centre ou de noyau structurel (l'arborescent). L'architecture de cette étude est la suivante : trois mouvements rhizomatiques reflétant la faculté de ces mots à autoriser sans cesse des constructions, effondrements et reconstructions du territoire textuel, à savoir la territorialisation, la déterritorialisation et la reterritorialisation. Cette démarche de type ritournelle aboutit ainsi à la reconnaissance de l'irréductibilité de l'écriture de Joyce dès ses premiers écrits. / This study aims primarily at re-thinking the relationship between Dubliners and the words "paralysis", "gnomon", and "simony" which appear in the very first paragraph of "The Sisters". Given that critics have approached them following patterns leading to the centering, de-centering and re-centering of Joyce's collection, the concept of rhizome, as developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, can be a relevant tool to present the variation of territoriality relationships between the work and the three words. At the end of this study, the latter are granted successive statuses, which challenge the idea of a structural center or core (the arborescent). The framework of this study is as follows: three rhizomatic movements illustrating the capacity of these words to allow for endless building, collapsing, and re-building of the textual territory, namely territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. This ritournelle style approach leads to the identification of Joyce's irreducible writing technique in his early period.

Orientador: Nina Virginia de Araujo Leite / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-12T15:58:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Leite_ClaudiaAparecidadeOliveira_D.pdf: 1255162 bytes, checksum: 51312fad47da614f80adcf78bf6149e9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: O nome próprio possui, na língua, um lugar de difícil manejo e elaboração teórica. Essa dificuldade de análise se torna potencializada quando se trata de nome próprio de pessoa, pois o nome próprio, no caso do humano, inclui um corpo. Essa tese, que já destaca em seu título o laço que liga nome e corpo, pretende discutir as vicissitudes cabíveis nesse enlaçamento. Para tal, partimos dos movimentos constitutivos que participam da emergência do sujeito e que estão implicados no ato de nomear (n'homear) salientando a dimensão do Nome-do-Pai nesse ato. Tais apontamentos foram construídos considerando a leitura que Freud fez do caso Schreber e as elaborações de Lacan sobre James Joyce, letra e escrita. / Abstract: Not informed. / Doutorado / Linguistica / Doutor em Linguística

This study concerns itself with the phenomenon of literary encyclopaedism, as especially evident in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Philippe Sollers' Paradis and Ezra Pound's Cantos. The study focuses on developing the notion of an encyclopaedic literary mode and on establishing the existence of a genre of fictional encyclopaedias. It finds an encyclopaedic mode in literature to be one comprehending and imitating other literary modes, both mimetic and didactic. Further, the idea of a fictional encyclopaedia is developed through an understanding of the traits of the neighbouring forms of essay, Menippean satire and epic, and through an understanding of the paradoxes associated with the making of the non-fictional encyclopaedia. The fictional encyclopaedia thus comprehends and exceeds the following traits: 1. A tension, characteristic of the essay, between integrated autobiography and impersonal (and ultimately fragmented) exposition of the categories of knowledge. 2. A tension, characteristic of the Menippean satire, between tale and digression, between a single narrating subject and a multiplicity of transient narrating voices. The menippea also contributes a simultaneous preoccupation with the most sacred and the most profane subjects. 3. A totalizing drive characteristic of the epic, a desire--rivalling the urge to tell a story--to list or include all aspects of the culture in the epic past. The fictional encyclopaedia also translates into fiction the following paradoxes associated with the encyclopaedic enterprise: 1. The recognition, implicit in the drive to trace a complete and eternally-perfect circle of the arts and sciences, that encyclopaedic knowledge is always ultimately incomplete and obsolete. 2. The recognition, at the heart of the attempt to produce an objective and unmediated picture of the world, that encyclopaedic knowledge is ideologically shaped and textually mediated. The dominance of the encyclopaedic gesture in Finnegans Wake, Paradis and the Cantos allows us to account for the characteristic length, obscurity and "bookishness" of these works; they absorb the traits and tensions of essay, Menippean satire and epic while yet exceeding these traits in their fictional translation of the encyclopaedic paradoxes noted above. This translation manifests itself in each work as a characteristic parodic hesitation before the authority of totalizing predecessors; it manifests itself in the texts' fascination with images of a paradisiacal completion and timelessness, a tendency that is undercut by a repetitive, digressive or fragmented form which asserts the inevitability of time and incompletion. Further, the Wake, Paradis and the Cantos, in their overt and extensive intertextual activity, emphasize the textual boundaries of encyclopaedic knowledge. Nonetheless, in their foregrounding and valorization of speech rhythms, the works also repeat the challenge that the encyclopaedia brings to its own limited nature as written book. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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