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.
"The first comprehensive account of the enormous impact of Joyce on German modernist and postmodern writers. An indispensable book on Joyce's 'German' face."—Gerald Gillespie, Stanford University In August 1919, a production of James Joyce's Exiles was mounted at the Munich Schauspielhaus and quickly fell due to harsh criticism. The reception marked the beginning of a dynamic association between Joyce, German-language writers, and literary critics. It is this relationship that Robert Weninger analyzes in The German Joyce. Opening a new dimension of Joycean scholarship, this book provides the premier study of Joyce's impact on German-language literature and literary criticism in the twentieth century. The opening section follows Joyce's linear intrusion from the 1910s to the 1990s by focusing on such prime moments as the first German translation of Ulysses, Joyce's influence on the Marxist Expressionism debate, and the Nazi blacklisting of Joyce's work. Utilizing this historical reception as a narrative backdrop, Weninger then presents Joyce's horizontal diffusion into German culture. Weninger succeeds in illustrating both German readers' great attraction to Joyce's work as well as Joyce's affinity with some of the great German masters, including Goethe and Rilke. He argues that just as Shakespeare was a model of linguistic exuberance for Germans in the eighteenth century, Joyce became the epitome of poetic inspiration in the twentieth. This volume, through Weninger's critiques and repositions, simultaneously revisits the fraught relationship between influence and intertextuality in literary studies and reassesses their value as tools for contemporary comparative criticism today. Robert K. Weninger, emeritus professor of German and comparative literature at King’s College London, is author or editor of over ten books, including Arno Schmidts Joyce-Rezeption 1957-1970: Ein Beitrag zur Poetik Arno Schmidts, and is a past editor of the Journal of Comparative Critical Studies.
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.
Morris Beja's concise yet thorough biography of James Joyce fills a void in Joycean studies by offering students and general readers a short, readable account of the great writer's life, concentrating on Joyce's sense of himself as an artist and on the ways in which he drew upon his life in weaving his fictions.
Joyce and Jung offers a provocatively original chapter-by-chapter analysis of Stephen Dedalus' psychosexual growth in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The author frames this within the Jungian soul-portrait gallery known as the «four stages of eroticism» in which Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia are the soul-portraits of Western civilization, drawing the collective eros into the psychic field to be witnessed as universal spectacle. In James Joyce's twentieth-century classic, Stephen's soul-portraits are the mother, the prostitute, the Virgin Mary, and the Bird-Girl.
«Hiromi Yoshida's innovative approach to 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' demonstrates how Joyce's Stephen Dedalus reaches a heightened state of creativity through his gradual integration of feminine elements into his psyche. This illuminating and stunning analysis presents a valuable contribution to psychoanalytic feminist theory as well as to Joyce studies.» (Nancy Bombaci, Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature, Mitchell College, New London, Connecticut).
