No description available.

No description available.

Traditional interpretations of James Joyce's Dubliners have often focused on the pervasive "paralysis" of the city, covered in the stories' range of "childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life." However, these approaches have limited their focus on the women in the stories, often spotlighting the male characters--and the author--through a Freudian lens; consequently, the interpretations have overlooked important considerations in light of developing feminist criticism. Through a selection of the stories, this thesis attempts to show how the text of Dubliners offers a cultural critique of the ways in which women were oppressed and constrained by the Irish Catholic ideology which established their roles within society. By the close of the collection, however, Joyce's creation of an inchoate image of the multi-dimensional, sexualized women of his mature works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is embodied in the character of Gretta Conroy in "The Dead." Using Judith Butler's theory of performative acts of gender construction and Julia Kristeva's cultural dynamic of "the maternal" in the Stabat Mater, this criticism of the text lifts the female characters from the backgrounds of Dubliners and reveals the diseased culture of Dublin from another perspective. The female characters in the text act out expected cultural roles, often modeled after the Irish Catholic ideal of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Through the speech, silence, and physical acts of the female characters in Dubliners, "the female" in Irish-Catholic-Victorian culture is constructed--and reinforced--for Joyce's audience. This reading then furthers our understanding of the institutions, values, and practices which defined "womanhood" in nineteenth-century Dublin. / Graduation date: 1999

No description available.

No description available.

This study is a detailed textual examination of the word "parallax" in Ulysses. It distinguishes three levels of meaning for the word in the novel. In the first level, parallax functions as a character motif, a detail, first appearing in and conforming to the realistic surface of Bloom's inner monologue, whose meaning is what it tells of his crucial problems of identity. In the second, parallax functions as an integral part of the symbolic complex, lying outside of Bloom's perceptions, surrounding the emblem of crossed keys, symbol of, among other things, paternity and homerule, two major narrative themes. The third level involves parallax as a symbol informing the novel's overriding theme of the writing of Ulysses itself and of the relationship between the novel's representative life and artistic design.

"May 2006." / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, Dept. of English. / "May 2006." / Includes bibliographic references (leaves 36-39)

In Aphrodite Unshamed: James Joyce's Romantic Aesthetics of Feminine Flow, I trace the influence of romanticism and anthropology on Joyce, and argue that he renews by classicalizing an ironic romantic genre also inspired by anthropology, the fairy tale arabesque. Created by the random cobbling together of fairytale types, plot elements, and set pieces, the arabesque's context was early anthropological work on folktales in Germany. I argue that, basing his fiction on this "nonsense" genre, Joyce mines the works of Homer, Shelley, Walter Pater, and Lucien Levy-Bruhl in order to promote--indeed, to narratively model--an abandonment of honor culture in favor of a neo-archaic culture of spiritualized sexual love. To do this, Joyce brings down to earth the airy Aphrodite of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and sexualizes the serpentine narrative trope Pater uses to aestheticize her power--both by chiasmatically structuring his fiction. Joyce envisions a world in which "cultural" men, because they sacralize and no longer shame female sexuality, participate in women's "primitive," i.e., not fully cultural, being. Indeed, I argue that, borrowing from Lucien Levy-Bruhl's conception of the mystical epistemologies of "primitives," Joyce viewed women as modern "primitives" capable of revitalizing overly intellectualized, alienated, and violent masculine Western culture. By creating recursive chiasmatic constructions of characters, images, and plot, Joyce creates layers of narrative infinity signs that body forth the unending "primitive" feminine rhythm that he makes the signature of his work. I argue that his work reveals that he viewed women as less than fully cultural, i.e., closer to rude animal life and the blunt forces of nature by virtue of sex, menstruation and child-bearing. He implicitly argues against the "new woman" and for women's continued "primitivity" in the service of his new, still male-produced, culture. His cooption of what he considers women's "primitive" essence is thus meant to be a source for cultural renewal for modern Westerners.

No description available.

No description available.