Narrative mourning : Joyce, Freud, Kincaid, Derrida

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

1959 Joyce Hill

1959-1960 Miss Lincoln

« Une épingle de sûreté... » : de l’appartenance nationale chez Joyce

L'auteure examine les rapports de l'écrivain à sa nation à travers quelques discussions métapolitiques représentées dans l'oeuvre de Joyce. Suivant de près l'enregistrement que fait Joyce des affects déclenchés par le sujet de la nation irlandaise, elle s'intéresse plus particulièrement à la duplicité — dédoublement et ruse — de la narration joycienne, qui lui permet d'accomplir l'injonction de Stephen Dedalus (« We can't change the country. Let us change the subject »), et de déplacer, à défaut de le changer, le sujet politique.

Narrative mourning : Joyce, Freud, Kincaid, Derrida

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Geometry and topography in James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Following the development of non-Euclidean geometries from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Euclid’s system had come to be re-conceived as a language for describing reality rather than a set of transcendental laws. As Henri Poincaré famously put it, ‘[i]f several geometries are possible, is it certain that our geometry [...] is true?’. By examining Joyce’s linguistic play and conceptual engagement with ground-breaking geometric constructs in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, this thesis explores how his topographical writing of place encapsulates a common crisis between geometric and linguistic modes of representation within the context of modernity. More specifically, it investigates how Joyce presents Euclidean geometry and its topographical applications as languages, rather than ideally objective systems, for describing visual reality; and how, conversely, he employs language figuratively to emulate the systems by which the world is commonly visualised. With reference to his early readings of Giordano Bruno, Henri Poincaré and other critics of the Euclidean tradition, it investigates how Joyce’s obsession with measuring and mapping space throughout his works enters into his more developed reflections on the codification of visual signs in Finnegans Wake. In particular, this thesis sheds new light on Joyce’s developing fascination with the ‘geometry of language’ practised by Bruno, whose massive influence on Joyce is often assumed to exist in Joyce studies yet is rarely explored in any great detail.