Fragments Of The Feminine Sublime In Friedrich Schlegel And James Joyce

This is the first book to extensively study Joyce's work in the context of Germanic Romantic literary theory. It illustrates how Joyce's modern and postmodern innovation of the novel finds its theoretical roots in Friedrich Schlegel's conception of the Romantic, fragmentary novel. Verstraete discusses the relevance of Schlegel's early Romanticism to the young Joyce's essays on symbolic-realistic drama and argues that what has traditionally been described as Joyce's personal appropriation of Hegel's dialectics can better be understood in terms of Schlegel's ironic approach to philosophy. She relates Schlegel's concepts of irony and of the fragment to his feminist critique of nineteenth-century bourgeois art, and of Kant's categories of the beautiful and the sublime. She argues that Schlegel's ironization of the sublime yields a rhetorical subversion of the opposition between male artist and female model, art and reality, as well as between the sublime and the beautiful. Verstraete illustrates this critical and political force of what she calls the "feminine sublime" at work in Schlegel's essays on Greek comedy and in his novel Lucinde. The book demonstrates how the Romantic (feminine) sublime, as the site where autonomous art generates its own critique, offers us the tools with which to interpret Joyce's postmodern innovations of Romantic art.

Traces the early German Romantic origins of Joyce's modern and postmodern innovation of the novel.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- PART I The Golden Age and Primitivism -- 1 The Savages -- 2 Prometheus and Orpheus -- 3 Atlantis -- PART II The Blossoming and Decline of Culture -- 4 The Age of Blossoming in Athens -- 5 Alexandria -- PART III The Problem of a National Golden Age -- 6 The Roman Model: Golden Age as a Modern Disease -- 7 From Classicism to Romanticism -- PART IV Kingdom of God -- 8 German Tradition of Chiliasm -- 9 From Eschatology to Kairology -- 10 The Gospel of Nature -- 11 Medievalism as the Externalisation of the Golden Age -- Conclusion -- Index

James Joyce's aesthetic theories, as explicated by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in the Scylla and Charybdis chapter of Ulysses, have generally been assumed to be grounded in Aristotle and Aquinas. Indeed, Stephen mentions those thinkers especially in Portrait, at the same time as he rejects Romantic notions. This book investigates the extent to which Joyce's theories as well as his practice, beginning with his critical writings and Stephen Hero, are indebted to early German Romanticism. The allusions, affinities, and analogies, as well as differential relationships between the Joycean oeuvre and texts of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schiegel, and Novalis are often palpable, sometimes tentative, but clearly present in most of his works, including Finnegans Wake.

This collection presents articles that examine Joyce and Beckett’s mutual interest in and use of the negative for artistic purposes. The essays range from philological to psychoanalytic approaches to the literature, and they examine writing from all stages of the authors’ careers. The essays do not seek a direct comparison of author to author; rather they lay out the intellectual and philosophical foundations of their work, and are of interest to the beginning student as well as to the specialist.

Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative locates Byron (and, to a lesser extent, Joyce) within a genealogy of romantic poetry understood not so much as imaginative self-expression or ideological case study but rather as what the German romantics call "romantische poesie"—an experimental form of poetry loosely based on the fragmentary flexibility and acute critical self-consciousness of Socratic dialogue. The book is therefore less an attempt to present yet another theory of romanticism than it is an effort to recover a more precise sense of the relationship between Byron's fragmentary or "workless" poetic and romantic poetry generally, and to articulate connections between romantic poetry and modern literature and literary theory. The book also argues that the "exigency" or "imperative" of the fragmentary works of Schlegel, Byron, Joyce, and Blanchot is not so much the expression of a style as it is an acknowledgment of what remains unthought in thinking.

In this 2001 book Jean-Michel Rabaté approaches the Joycean canon through the concept of 'egoism'.

A rich examination of the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce In this book, Fran O’Rourke examines the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce, arguing that both thinkers fundamentally shaped the philosophical outlook which pervades the author’s oeuvre. O’Rourke demonstrates that Joyce was a philosophical writer who engaged creatively with questions of diversity and unity, identity, permanence and change, and the reliability of knowledge. Beginning with an introduction to each thinker, the book traces Joyce’s discovery of their works and his concrete engagement with their thought. Aristotle and Aquinas equipped Joyce with fundamental principles regarding reality, knowledge, and the soul, which allowed him to shape his literary characters. Joyce appropriated Thomistic concepts to elaborate an original and personal aesthetic theory. O’Rourke provides an annotated commentary on quotations from Aristotle that Joyce entered into his famous Early Commonplace Book and outlines their crucial significance for his writings. He also provides an authoritative evaluation of Joyce’s application of Aquinas’s aesthetic principles. The first book to comprehensively illuminate the profound impact of both the ancient and medieval thinker on the modernist writer, Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas offers readers a rich understanding of the intellectual background and philosophical underpinnings of Joyce’s work. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles