James Joyce's negations : irony, indeterminacy and nihilism in Ulysses and other writings / Brian Cosgrove.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cosgrove, Brian.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Joyce, James, 1882-1941--Criticism and interpretation.

Joyce, James.

Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses.

Joyce, James, 1882-1941.

Irony in literature.

Nihilism in literature.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

ix, 256 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Dublin, Ireland : University College Dublin Press, 2007.

Summary:

The main purpose of this study is to validate a reading of Joyce in negative terms. Central to the enquiry is an examination of the roles of irony and of indeterminacy. Irony, interpreted in metaphysical rather than merely rhetorical terms, is envisaged as deriving from two separate if related orientations, one associated with Friedrich Schlegel, the other with Gustave Flaubert. Insofar as Joyce's work (including Ulysses) owes more to the latter than the former, it forgoes the genial humour central to Schlegel's theories, and embraces instead the ironic detachment and formal control of a Flaubertian perspective. Such irony (which entails a suspicion of sentiment and a related dehumanisation of character, as in some of the stories in Dubliners) becomes normative in Joyce, and along with a similarly deflationary parody pervades Ulysses. In addition, a persistent indeterminacy is established as early as 'The Dead', so that it becomes impossible in that story to adjudicate between not just contradictory but mutually exclusive interpretations. Such indeterminacy is pushed to further extremes in Ulysses, with its notorious proliferation of narrative perspectives. As a corollary to the work's encyclopedic inclusiveness and quotidian particularism, every detail tends to assume the same significance as every other; the consequence being that (in Gyorgy Lukacs' famous formulation) we lose all sense of any 'hierarchy of meaning'. From that it is but a step to Franco Moretti's assessment that in Ulysses everyday existence remains 'inert, opaque - meaningless', and that in fact the whole point is to represent the meaningless precisely 'as meaningless'. Indeterminacy, in effect, ushers in the possibility of nihilism.

The analysis of Ulysses culminates with the attempt (unavailing in both cases) to discover in either Bloom or Molly a genuine source of countervailing affirmation. The study concludes with a brief consideration of the polysemic vocabulary of Finnegans Wake as a logical extrapolation of the poetics of indeterminacy.

Contents:

Part 1 Irony and Indeterminacy as Normative

1 Irony and Inclusiveness 19

2 Dubliners and the Persistence of Irony 44

Part 2 Irony, Technique and the Fate of Sentiment in Ulysses

3 Technique and Language in Ulysses 71

4 Sentiment, Music, Women 95

Part 3 Multiperspectivism, Indeterminacy and Nihilism in Ulysses

5 Fragmentariness, Pluralism, Indeterminacy and the Question of 'Meaning' in Ulysses 135

6 'Ithaca' and the Futility of Taxonomy, Ulysses and the Question of Order/Design 147

Part 4 Negation and the Possibility of affirmation: Bloom, 'Ithaca' and 'Penelope'

7 Leopold Bloom: Passive Hero or 'Aesthetic Man'? 159

8 Avoiding the Void? 'Ithaca' and 'The Apathy of the Stars' 167

9 Trying to Say 'Yes': Ironising Molly Bloom 177

Part 5 Finnegans Wake as Culmination

10 The Paradox of Willed Indeterminacy in Finnegans Wake 211

Postscript: Joyce and the Limitations of Comedy 227.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-244) and index.

ISBN:

9781904558859

1904558852

OCLC:

153559992