James Joyce S Aesthetic Theory

Joyce's early fiction embodies two finally incompatible ideals: naturalism and romanticism. Joyce's naturalism confirmed his allegiance to ordinary life amongst the lower classes. More importantly, the naturalistic tenet that environment determines character supported Joyce's bitter resentment of a social milieu that threatened to destroy his promise as an artist. His youthful response was to tailor Dubliners to serve his thesis that Dublin was the centre of spiritual paralysis that eventually afflicted all who remained there. Concurrently, Joyce believed art served life, a central expression of his aesthetic. In Chamber Music , Dubliners , Stephen Hero , and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Joyce identifies life with an idealistic romanticism devoted to adventurous freedom, to a consuming worship of the Virgin, but most importantly, to epiphany, the free artist's realisation of the threat posed to his soul and vocation by family, church, and nation. In upholding the ideals of naturalism and romanticism, Joyce embodies their incompatibilities. On the one hand, he attempts to establish his naturalistic thesis that all Dubliners succumb to Dublin's hemiplegia; on the other hand, his main fictive technique of epiphany implies the Dublin born narrator's freedom. In later works, Joyce criticised the naturalism and romanticism Dubliners expressed, though he never abandons romanticism entirely, as he never abandons his naturalistic interest in the ''here and now." In Portrait , the narrator's irony undermines Stephen's romanticism, but is not synonymous with Joyce's rejection of the aesthetic as some critics contend. Joyce consistently practised Stephen's aesthetic theory developed in Portrait 's fifth chapter. Joyce's tailoring his life to demonstrate the aesthetic resembles the application of his naturalism previously. These demonstrations of theory support the conjecture that the application of naturalism and of the aesthetic stem from a personal need for a standard of order and knowledge that precedes the novelist's full and disinterested response to life when and where he finds it. This need is a major theme of Portrait . Though Joyce in Ulysses modifies the aesthetic of Portrait , its central terms remain unchallenged throughout his works. In the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses , Bloom's equanimity challenges Stephen's romanticism and assists in Bloom's general redefinition of stasis as equanimity and sympathy rather than romantic and mercurial flight as in Portrait . Bloom's responsiveness, his refusal to be bitter or resentful, his refusal to adopt a biased belief or thesis that Dublin is paralysed are vivid testimony to Joyce's consummate achievement as a novelist responsible to life when and where he finds it. Despite the achievement Bloom represents, Ulysses is plagued by problems akin to the application of Joyce's naturalism in Dub liners . In the late revisions of Ulysses , Joyce attempted to move away from the novel into the mode of Finnegans Wake . Such a shift neglects meaning expressed in character and narrative event for the drama of allusions revealed in the ordinary. Joyce's adherence to the plan of Ulysses , to demonstrations of art, colour, technique, etc., resemble his application of naturalism and aesthetic theory. Large sections of Ulysses flesh out such formal matters, often apart from any dramatic considerations of character, event or theme, as we witness in the vast catalogue of opiates in the Lotus Eaters episode, in the catalogue of food in the Lestrygonians, or in the illustrations of blind mechanism in the Wandering Rocks. In Joyce's aesthetic belief that art imitates nature, in the aesthetic theory's stress upon formal relations of part to whole, in the emblematic character of quidditas , wherein the object in its essence becomes a substitute for the object's manifest appearances lies Joyce's justification of his method. Joyce's concentration upon technique as meaning reinforces his shift away from the novel where character and narrative event are the primary vehicles of meaning. In Finnegans Wake , language and technique are the protagonists. Finnegans Wake makes no pretense of being a novel, but use of the term is not solely confined to the literary form of and the painter, to ground his art the novel, for perhap as much as the novel! in the immediacy of s one expects the poet st, to serve life and human experience.

How did James Joyce see himself in relation to Henrik Ibsen? What were his views of Nietzsche, Hegel, Coleridge, or Ruskin? When did the youthful Joyce begin to devote serious attention to aesthetics and poetics? In The Aesthetics of James Joyce Jacques Aubert examines Joyce's ideas on the function of art and literature against the background of late-nineteenth--and early-twentieth-century British and European intellectual history. Aubert focuses on Joyce's critical writings, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses as well as on the literary and philosophical texts--from Aristotle to Nietzsche--with which he was most closely concerned. Aubert is less interested in tracing specific intellectual antecedents, however, than in assessing the role Joyce assigned himself in relation to his literary and philosophical contemporaries and predecessors. First published in French in 1973, The Aesthetics of James Joyce is the first full-length treatment of James Joyce's aesthetic ideas. Substantially revised and expanded and translated by the author, it gives a coherent unity to Joyce's scattered writings on aesthetics while placing them in a rich historical context.

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 study explores James Joyce's struggle to come to terms with the aesthetic outlooks current at the beginning of the century by examining his portrayal of their dangers and attractions in his two most fully realized characters, Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.

Jaurretche (English, U. of California-Los Angeles) traces the development of the Irish writer's mystical aesthetic through his novels to its supreme culmination and negation in Finnegan's Wake. She also shows how the search to surmount all human categories and sensations in order to encounter the divine, arose and developed in the Middle Ages, and was transmitted into modernism during and just before Joyce's time. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This monograph is based on archival research and close readings of James Joyce's and W. B. Yeats's poetics and political aesthetics. Georges Sorel's theory of social myth is used as a starting point for exploring the ways in which the experience of art can be seen as a form of religious experience.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is semi-autobiographical, following Joyce's fictional alter-ego through his artistic awakening. The young artist Steven Dedelus begins to rebel against the Irish Catholic dogma of his childhood and discover the great philosophers and artists. He follows his artistic calling to the continent.