James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's NightmareOxford University Press, 1994 - 195 pagine "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". Stephen Dedalus's famous words articulate the modern complaint concerning the burden of the past. In James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare, Robert Spoo argues that Joyce's creative achievement, from the time of his sojourn in Rome in 1906-07 to the completion of Ulysses in 1922, cannot be understood apart from the ferment of historical thought that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing Joyce's historiographic art to its formative contexts - the discourse of Romanticism, the New History and Nietzschean antihistoricism, doctrines of progress, Irish history and politics, traditions of rhetoric, the ideological language of literary history - Spoo reveals a modernist author passionately engaged with the problem of history, forging a new language that both dramatizes and redefines that problem. Born into a culture oppressed by its history, Joyce was preoccupied by it. Torn between conflicting images of Ireland's past, he was confronted with the challenge of creating a historical conscience. His art became his political protest, and the belief that individual passion and freely expressed works of fiction defy and subvert dominant discourses is the basis of his historiographic art. Both broadly philosophical and alert to the subtleties of Joyce's texts, this study uses a critical approach that draws on the historical and philosophical thought that shaped Joyce and his contemporaries. Spoo provides a rich and evocative context for reading Ulysses as well as other Joycean texts. He shows that for Joyce, as for his fictional alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, there is no waking from the nightmare ofhistory, only the ceaseless reweaving of the texts that make history a nightmare. |
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Aeolus aesthetic anthology artist called century chapter Circe conception of history context contextualist critics cultural Deasy Deasy's discourse Dublin enthymeme episode of Ulysses Essays Eumaeus Ferrero fiction figure Finnegans Wake gesture ghost Giambattista Vico Hayden White hero historian historical process historiographic human Ibid ideas of history Ireland Irish ironic Ithaca James Joyce James Joyce Quarterly James Joyce's Joyce's Ulysses Kenneth Burke L'Europa giovane Laforgue Laforgue's language Lecky Leopold Bloom Letters literary literature marriage meaning metaphor modern Molly monocausality moral narrative Nestor Nietzsche nightmare of history nineteenth-century notion novel Oxen Parnell parody passage past Pater Penelope Phoenix Park murders phrase poem poet Portrait progress Proteus reality rhetoric Roman Rome Stephen and Bloom Stephen Dedalus Stephen's Parable story structure styles T. S. Eliot teleological telos textual praxis thinking tion tory trans Trieste trope Ulysses University Press Vico W. B. Yeats words writing wrote Yeats York young