THE INFLUENCE OF RICHARD WAGNER AND HIS MUSIC-DRAMAS ON THE WORKS OF JAMES JOYCE.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Martin, Timothy Peter.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Subjects (All):

English literature.

Irish literature.

British literature.

0593.

Local Subjects:

0593.

Physical Description:

252 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 42-06A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

As a musician and a literary artist, James Joyce was in a unique position to know well the music-dramas of Richard Wagner. His youthful interest in Wagner was undoubtedly affected and in some cases inspired by his knowledge of intermediary artists like Shaw, Yeats, Moore, Symons, D'Annunzio, and Dujardin. Wagner's influence on Joyce was not simply to provide him with minutiae for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. First, in establishing Siegfried as a parallel for Stephen Dedalus in Portrait and Ulysses, Joyce was not only asserting the heroic nature of the artist; he was also invoking Wagnerian theories on artistic freedom, artistic creation, the relationship between art and culture, and the function of art. Second, Joyce found an excellent counterpart to Siegfried in the hero of The Flying Dutchman, who was generally regarded as an avatar of the Wandering Jew and as an artist figure of another sort--cursed by his special sensitivity and isolated by his refusal to conform to artistic and moral standards. Third, as important figures in the nineteenth century's romantic mythology of woman, Wagner's female characters were ideally positioned to help Joyce represent his perceived division between sexual and spiritual impulses in his characters and in himself. Fourth, Joyce recognized at an early age the possibilities of myth as a basis for contemporary art, and Wagner's example showed him the way. Fifth, Wagner's theory of the synthesis of the arts inspired many literary artists to imitate musical expression in their own work, and Joyce's use of the literary leitmotif and his attention to the music as well as to the sense of language is in keeping with a tradition which includes both novelists and Symbolist poets. What Joyce most importantly took from Wagner was the universality provided by this combination of music and myth, one contributing to the "texture," the other to the "structure," of his work. For all the difficulty of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Joyce, like Wagner, intended his work to serve a communal function.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-06, Section: A, page: 2687.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1981.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

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