Publications

Publication details [#10408]

Whitley, Catherine A. 1992. James Joyce's politics of print: Gender, popular culture, and history in "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake". Irvine, Calif.. 216 pp.

Abstract

Joyce uses double narrative structures in 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' to criticize Ireland's reactionary attitudes and art and to hypothesize a more progressive society and prose. Women's treatment in patriarchy is for Joyce a synecdoche for the treatment of the Irish by the English; both women and the Irish are suppressed and desire to have their own voices and their own art. Joyce uses mass culture as part of his gendered political project to forge a new writing and a new history for his country; within the form of the novel Joyce rewrites such popular culture forms as newspaper articles, ballads, plays, romances, and music hall songs in order to interrogate popular culture's reification of repressive nationalist and patriarchal ideology and to produce a hybrid prose which provides new forms for Irish culture. 'Finnegans Wake' ultimately promotes a pedagogy which replaces hegemonic interpretation with reading and writing strategies that encourage personal responsibility and tolerate difference. Chapter 1 situates Joyce's project in the context of modernist interest in gender and androgyny, discusses Joyce's subversion of his own masculine authorial authority in proliferating prose styles, and treats Joyce's varied relationships with women. Chapter 2 examines 'Ulysses' "Cyclops" chapter and 'Finnegans Wake' 's "Ballad" chapter, in which Irish nationalism and nationalistic art are shown to be politically reactionary and by identification masculine. Chapter 3 discusses the "Nausicaa" and "Penelope" chapters of 'Ulysses', in which women attempt to disrupt cultural stereotypes by defining their sexuality in the production of art. In her montage of songs Molly creates socially socially relevant art, and is the figure for Joyce-as-artist in the book. Chapter 4 considers masculine and feminine attitudes towards reading and writing, as depicted in the "Hen" and "Night Lessons" chapters of 'Finnegans Wake'. Joyce's pedagogical project becomes explicit in these two chapters, and ALP and Issy are practitioners of the type of reading and writing that is required. Joyce ultimately exalts these "feminine" practices and their concomitant "feminine" qualities only to criticize the socially constructed nature of gender; for Joyce a progressive social order would be an androgynous and egalitarian one as ensured by co-education. (Dissertation Abstracts)