James Joyce

The first few decades of the 20th century was a tumultuous period of incredible innovation and constant change. It was also an era where the open questioning of much of what had been assumed and accepted was not simply a viable option, it was essentially a mandatory reality of the time. This critical relationship with tradition was manifest in religious ideology, scientific dogma, economic realities, and personal expression in the arts. The impact of Modernist thought and perspective was acutely experienced in the realm of literature. Many great voices emerged during this time, but James Joyce and Virginia Woolf stand out for numerous reasons. Both authors exhibit the tell-tale signs of a Modernist author. Whether that be Woolf’s groundbreaking innovations in narrative structure (Lodwick), specifically as it relates to an Einsteinian understanding of time and space (Tolliver Brown), or Joyce’s radical new approach dialogue and inner monologue in works like Ulysses (Lawrence), these authors were never afraid to question traditional authority and engage in ceaseless and sweeping innovation. Literary Modernism was not a monolithic movement and Modern thinkers were constantly evolving in thought (Mead), so definitions are elusive. However, Literary Modernism was an early 20th century reaction to the ideology and form of the Victorian realism dominant in Europe and the United States. Modernism broke with the rigidity of inherited literary norms, especially in regards to traditional narrative, character focus and development, dialogue, and how the reader (and characters) experience time. Joyce and Woolf are each superb examples of just what this artistic movement truly was.

In discussing the place of diverse qualitative research within psychological science, the authors highlight the potential permeability of the quantitative-qualitative boundary and identify different ways of increasing communication between researchers specializing in different methods. Explicating diversity within qualitative research is facilitated, initially, through documenting the range of qualitative data collection and analytic methods available. The authors then consider the notion of paradigmatic frame and review debates on the current and future positioning of qualitative research within psychological science. In so doing, the authors argue that the different ways in which the concept of paradigm can be interpreted allow them to challenge the idea that diverse research paradigms are prima facie incommensurate. Further, reviewing the ways in which proponents of qualitative research are seeking to reconfigure the links between paradigms helps the authors to envisage how communication between research communities can be enhanced. This critical review allows the authors to systematize possible configurations for research practice in psychology on a continuum of paradigm integration and to specify associated criteria for judging intermethod coherence.

[This article is published in the book "Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (editors: J. Constâncio, M.J. Branco & B. Ryan. de Gruyter, 2015).]
While Kierkegaard belongs to a generation earlier than Nietzsche, he is not a source of Nietzsche’s thought, and in fact his reception (like Nietzsche’s) is mostly posthumous. There has been much written on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche by world famous philosophers and commentators (with the forerunners being Georg Brandes, Georg Lukács, Karl Löwith and Karl Jaspers) for the obvious reason in that they epitomise the philosopher of suspicion par excellence in the wake of Hegelian philosophy, the
birth of modern democracy and nationalism, and the beginning of mass media, the scientific age and a secular society. While acknowledges the previous work done by philosophers and scholars up until now, I seek to show in this article that in fact the subjectivity that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are grappling with in the age of modernism and beyond is a subjectivity that is transformed into a plurality rather than being nothing at all or unified. This article can be read both as a penetrating dialogue between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard bringing them closer together, and also as a subtle critique of them and critique of our understanding of them – in that Kierkegaard’s “purity of heart to will one thing” and objective to unify the self as subject, and Nietzsche’s destruction of all values and truths about the existence of subjectivity, turns the elusive self as subject into a plurality and disunity. Thus, we may think of Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus’ motto “truth is subjectivity” – truth being Climacus’ “wound of negativity” – as applying to both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Probably the most important difference between
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (born thirty-one years before Nietzsche) is their relationship to Christianity and appraisal of Socrates and Christ as prototypes for living passionately and thinking dangerously. But this great difference helps
shed light on our understanding of the crisis of subjectivity in why Nietzsche was so vehemently against Socrates and Christ, and why and how Kierkegaard was so determined to renew an extremely passionate Imitatione Christi and awaken a new Socrates for the present age. This idea of Christianity and these figures under scrutiny provide the basis for the transformation of subjectivity
into a plurality for Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s future readers. In this article, we can think again of the many points of contact between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche via experiencing the plurality of the subject, such as, for example, in their celebration of existential passion in their striking depictions of a Dionysian
and Christ-like existence; their anti-system stance and unrelenting critique of modern philosophy; the creation of masks and multiple voices; the attack against the bourgeoisie of emerging democratic society and the established church; their increasingly solitary existence; their call for honesty; their humour, irony and wit; and finally their stylistic positioning as dramatic-poetic thinkers at odds with academic philosophical writing.

The relationship with Romanticism of a great Modernist like James Joyce is a complex subject, ambiguously denoted by a shady mixture of rejection and pervasive influence. In the years of his formation and youth, the cultural paradigm of Romanticism played a crucial role in defining Joyce’s conception of literature and art, and its importance is directly transposed in the autobiographical fictionalisation of Joyce’s own development through his two Bildungsromane, Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist a Young Man. By examining his juvenile critical writings, this study tries at first to reconstruct his complex relationship with Romanticism and its epigones. While in his famous essay about James Clarence Mangan Joyce condemns the misconceived Romantic temper that distinguished the 19th century, his cultural formation is shaped by authors and works that are somehow connected with this dominating Romantic paradigm. Besides, it can also be observed that some of the original Romantics, poets like Shelley, Byron and Blake, are considered positive models for the emerging artist, becoming some of Joyce’s early literary heroes. After evaluating the complex critical position of the Irish author towards the Romantics and Romanticism, this study considers how this influence is transposed in the two versions of his Künstlerroman. In particular, it is worth noting that Romanticism acquires a fundamental role in the fragmentary, unpublished novel Stephen Hero. Here, the Romantic temper is not only a negative conception of art, but also a misleading attitude in front of life and reality: Stephen Daedalus’ progress, therefore, has to move beyond it to succeed in becoming a complete artist.  In A Portrait of the Artist a Young Man, on the contrary, Romanticism also plays a role in the symbolic and thematic architecture of the novel, even though Joyce’s critical positions are no more directly and explicitly tackled in the narrative. Indeed, references to Romanticism become a way to better represent the protagonist’s mindset and his relationship with the external world, always ambiguously – and often ironically – defined by his Romantic flights and more earthly resolutions. By comparing the role of Romanticism in the two novels, therefore, this work aims at better understanding a fundamental phase of Joyce’s production, through the analysis of the evolution of the symbolic structures of cultural and literary references that will recur also in his later masterpieces.

This critical introduction to Eco-Joyce: the Environmental Imagination of James Joyce briefly outlines the ecocritical field for readers of Joyce who are unfamiliar with this critical outlook; it then discusses recent advances in ecocriticism and Irish Studies, as well as contemporary work in  Joyce scholarship; and, finally, it offers a brief overview of the essays in this collection and how they engage with issues of space, place and environment in Joyce’s fiction and non-fiction.

James Joyce's collection of short stories; Dubliners is one of the most famous modernist works in the history of literature. Stories in the collection have common qualities such as the similarity of themes and techniques and have an order according to these qualities. This paper will examine two of these stories: "Eveline" and "The Boarding House" and the themes of paralysis, oppression and emancipation. The difference between these stories which is the existence of the paralysis of both genders is going to be the other aspect. The stories of "The Boarding House" and "Eveline" in Dubliners states the oppressed and paralyzed state of women and Ireland by the employment of modernist techniques such as epiphany and open-ending.

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce develops his interest in the secret organisation Freemasonry in two respects – in accordance to how moral instructions are taught using two tenets: firstly, by studying allegories taken from a vast range of world religions, ancient and modern. Secondly, using the “ancient method of [studying] symbolism” (Albert G. Mackey in The Symbolism of Freemasonry). Both Freemasonic and Finnegans Wake symbols derive from a tradition of symbols dating back to time immemorial: originating in paganism and progressing through to the present incorporating ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Judaic, Hindu, and Christian cultural and allegorical meanings. My paper researches how the symbolic system of Freemasonry is alluded to and imitated in Finnegans Wake owing to its all-inclusive symbolic system. An encyclopaedic corpus of religious and mythical allegories exists in the novel, and Masonic symbols and traditions assist immeasurably in forming its architectonic structure. Additionally, Joyce's personal “numerological” system in Finnegans Wake functions parallel to Freemasonic concerns involving ancient Greek (specifically) Pythagorean “sacred geometry”:  imitated in Book II chapter 2's mathematical “lesson” and parodistic transcription of a Euclidian proposition on page 293. The accompanying “meditation” on ancient symbolic designs including the Judaic “Seal of Solomon”, and the Christian 'Vesica Piscis' links together yet more cultures through visuals and associative allegories and myth.