"Moving Bodies: James Joyce and the ""New Physics"""
Goldberg, Michael Emanuel
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81502
Description
Title
"Moving Bodies: James Joyce and the ""New Physics"""
Author(s)
Goldberg, Michael Emanuel
Issue Date
1999
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
James Hurt
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, Modern
Language
eng
Abstract
"James Joyce was an innovator in modern literature, and many of his resources and approaches have been examined thoroughly. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, however, is an under-explored influence on Joyce's later fiction. As he wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Joyce culled from the Einsteinian ideas that were ""in the air"" the inspiration for a cluster of radical narrative techniques. Because Einstein's theories appear to hold equally true for animate and inanimate matter, they coincide smoothly with Joyce's search for a ""soft"" modernism that favors humanism. Joyce's human-centered aesthetic can be called ""Einsteinian narrative,"" and it includes bodies in motion, cinematic style, and multiple perspectives (including mythic ones). The final result is a novelistic form in which the subject (both storyteller and reader) and the object (the story) are all in motion with respect to each other. The result of this form is a full, objective, thorough representation of modern Dublin and modern humanity. My project climaxes by arguing that pieces of Finnegans Wake consist of Joyce setting up a dichotomy. On the one side, Joyce suggests Wyndham Lewis as representative of the Fascistic, ""hard"" modernist whose vision of art draws from out-dated Newtonian absolute reference frames. Contrary to this, Joyce represents himself as a ""soft,"" Einsteinian modernist, who (though flawed) privileges an intuitive, subjective, humanist agenda."
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