Diss.--Tübingen--Univ., 1997. / Bibliogr. p. 213-223. Index.

Thesis (Honors)--University of South Florida, 2009. / "Spring 2009." Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-63).

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1978.

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 thesis presents an account of the relationship between literary Theory and close reading in Joyce studies. Throughout, 'Theory' is understood not in a general, conceptual sense, but as a word we use to refer to certain specified intellectual developments in the literary academy that have taken place over roughly the last half-century. Working from the basis that little can be deduced regarding the contentious relationship between Theory and close reading as long as the issue remains an abstract one, the thesis works towards a description of that relationship based upon scrutiny of key works in the field. To that end, it performs a series of case studies of some of the more significant attempts to combine a deep Theoretical commitment with rigorous textual analysis. The argument developed is that in a significant number of cases a commitment to reading 'Theoretically' has led the critic into an erroneous reading of the literary text under discussion. The possibility of such error is defined with reference to a set of standards which, the author hopes, will be accepted by most scholars working in the field. Alongside this primary concern, the thesis sets out a technique of close reading designed to minimise the chances of such errors occurring. This technique is referred to as Thematic Stylistics. Requiring both broad and deep engagement with literary texts, it aims to encourage both fidelity and sensitivity when put into practice, and thereby to act as a balance to the suggested tendencies of Theoretical reading. This technique is not left as a set of bare principles, but is exemplified in alternate chapters with reference to errors discussed during the critique described above. Together, the critique of Theory and the outline of Thematic Stylistics are taken to provide a constructive suggestion for the future of the academy.

This thesis is an analysis of the chiastic structure in the tenth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, Wandering Rocks, and how it relates to the chiastic elements in the novel as a whole. My reading of Wandering Rocks and Ulysses is designed to explain the contradiction between the episode's appearance of structural stability and the novel's consistent denial of unifying structures. Chiastic structure will be shown to reflect a formal process of simultaneous growth and decay that develops in the novel, and the reading of Wandering Rocks will establish how the pattern traces points of convergence between the novel's aesthetics and the organic processes that occur in the referential level of the text. While I argue that Wandering Rocks announces an inevitable loss of structural stability, the examination of its structure reveals formal principles that remain consistent throughout Ulysses .

The Recurrence of Rhythm is an inquiry into the notion that the voice flows ??? a theme that continually recurs in the Homeric poems, Plato's Cratylus and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Through a re-interpretation of the meaning of rhythmos in pre-Socratic philosophy, I define rhythm as the particular manner in which the voice is flowing, and argue that it is the specific quality of phonetic writing to represent the flowing aspect of the voice. The Greek concept of rhythmos is held to be inseparable from the invention of phonetic writing and the transcription of the Homeric poems, and it is this new definition of rhythm that allows the thesis to engage in contemporary debates concerning the relationship between speech and writing (as developed by Derrida, Ong, Havelock, Parry, Lord and Prier). I also argue that the Platonic concept of rhythm qua metre provides an essential point of mediation between the Greek oral tradition and the history of Western literature, a move that sets the scene for a comparative study of Homer and Joyce. By developing an original concept of recurrence that pertains to both the repetition of themes in the Homeric poems and the heroic experience of living for the sake of the story, this thesis proposes that rhythm and recurrence are interrelated concepts that distinguish the lyrical and dramatic modes that structure the epic form of narrative found in both Homer's poems and Joyce's novels. Drawing upon the esthetic philosophy of Stephen Dedalus, I develop the dialectical theory of genre first outlined by Joyce in the Paris notebook, and argue that the latent lyricism contained in the narrative style of A Portrait is a proto-typical form of the interior monologue found in Ulysses. In opposition to the early modernist paradigm of Joyce criticism, this thesis rejects the notion that mythic archetypes function as Platonic ideals (i.e. the transcendent form of the modernist artwork), but rather holds that heroic themes recur in the mental stream of the modern subject, and manifest themselves immediately through Joyce???s use of the interior monologue technique.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2008. / Title from PDF title page (viewed May 27, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-87)

Texte remanié de: Thesis Ph. D.--Göteborg, Suède--Université de Göteborg, 2003. / Bibliogr. p.193-204. Index.

Thesis (M.A.)--Marshall University, 2004. / Title from document title page. Includes abstract. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 74 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-73).