http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1038580

The body in the text James Joyce''s Ulysses and the modern Greek novel

This thesis examines the body's thematization in narrative, and as part of the aesthetic consciousness of the modernist novel. Its starting point is Joyce's pioneering association of Ulysses with the functions of a live body, and the interdisciplinary rationale that his Thomist aesthetics of wholeness enact. Joyce's view of his text as a multi-levelled, reciprocally interdependent hierarchy of various fields, including art and science, as developed in the Linati and Gilbert Schemes, sheds light on the polyphonic and polyglottic narratorial tactics of U. Joyce's enterprise is compared to the Greek modernist novel which developed its innovative techniques in accordance with the general demand for a reorientation of Greek literature toward introspection. The reception of U in Greece coincided with the heyday of this attempt which was characterized by experimentation and was influenced by psychoanalysis, phenomenology and anthropological studies. The three Greek authors in this study, Stelios Xefloudas, Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis, Giorgos Cheimonas, each of them representing a different period in the development of the modem novel, were variously influenced by Joyce's work. The argument particularly focuses on their use of the body in the text in the light of Joyce's work. The foreword, a theoretical introduction, sets forth the terms of the argument. The first chapter is a brief survey of Us reception in Greece. It discusses the quest for the renewal of Greek literature which started around the thirties. Tracing the links of this renewal With Joyce's work, it particularly focuses on the techniques of introspection and their association with the body, as part of the aesthetic consciousness of the inner-orientated or 'introverted' novel. The second chapter is an analysis of Joyce's paradigmatic use of the body in the text. Focusing on the act of creation in comedy, scientific discovery and aesthetic rapture, it discusses the psycho-physiological processes and the cultural psycho-dynamics which are compressed within Q, and support its multi-perspectival and multi-interpretative orientation. Joyce's mock-heroic, his anti-theology, the aesthetics of the androgynous artist, desire in language and bodily interference in the act of writing are seen in relation to the body and in the light of Joyce's explanatory schemes. Chapter three examines Xefloudas's attempted assimilation of Joyce's introspective techniques, in the use of myth, in the questing voyager archetype, and in desire in language through the myth of eternal return. The fourth chapter discusses N.G. Pentzikis's Christian-Freudian-Jungian perspective on Joyce's work and his reworking of Us motifs in a surrealist mode (dream, metamorphosis, free association). His endeavour to subvert his own literary past takes place through the re-writing of Drosmiis's novel, To Mythistorema fis Kytlas Ersis. In this book all elements of Greek modernism are welded together. Pentzikis undoes and redoes the Parnassian novel, drawing heavily upon Q, and the Hellenic and Byzantine legacies which he semi-parodically incorporates into his art. His use of the Rabelaislan body and the grotesque, which reflects his language games, also emulates Joyce's. The fifth chapter deals with Cheimonas, as a successor of the previous authors. Cheimonas revisits all the thematic motifs of Joyce and of the aforementioned Greek authors in the light of contemporary phenomenology, psychoanalysis, psycho-linguistics and deconstruction. In an attempted assimilation of the language of FW and Joyce's preoccupation with the sound of the word, he writes an elliptical prose violated in its syntax, grammar and word-formation. His texts are a journey to the origins of language. Through violent dramatizations of psycho-linguistic theories, these texts aim at revealing the body's voice.

Open All Close All