Perspective, point of view, and perception : James Joyce and Frederic Jameson.
| dc.contributor.author | Mercer, Todd | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-08-14T22:51:47Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-08-14T22:51:47Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 1987 | en_US |
| dc.date.issued | 1987 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of English | |
| dc.degree.level | Master of Arts M.A. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | The works Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, and Ulysses by James Joyce can be seen as an effort to overcome the fixity of consciousness, and specifically the limited perception, resulting from life in a colonial culture. His work reflects a rejection of absolute categorical thought and fixed forms in favor of fluidity--liberated consciousness and perception. In Dubliners Joyce diagnoses the mental paralysis of Irish society. Characters are locked into fixed modes of perception. In their colonial situation they are temporally contained, cut off from historical process and perception--caught in a daily struggle for existence. Joyce's Dubliners are unable to perceive the sources of their own oppression and therefore cannot act to change their situation. The author offers no way out of this containment and the reader participates in this closure through the limiting perspective of fixed point of view. The stories of Dubliners are traditional when compared with the more radical and modern A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce uses the modernist juxtapositional technique in the stylistic shifts of each chapter and in the shift of point of view encountered in Stephen's diary. He identifies language as a source of oppression that imposes fixity of perception. Yet the novel's own language continually resists fixity, constantly transcending preceding forms; no portrait or fixed frame holds for the growing protagonist. Joyce offers the reader a new perspective of Stephen in the diary. Similarly, the protagonist prepares to embark on a journey that will give him a new perspective on his life in colonial society. We, like Stephen, can only perceive the sources of our own oppression by stepping outside the tyrannizing situation--by achieving new perspective. Joyce's Ulysses represents a far more extensive challenge to fixity of consciousness. While the book often observes the condition of reification in modern life--the reduction of people and ideas to things--it resists settling in to such a fixed commodity itself. The language of Ulysses offers liberating perception when it is fluid--when it resists the limitations of categorical thought. Ulysses also undermines the category of the subject in fiction. The latter portion of the book transcends exclusive angles of vision which are associated with the narrative subject and fixed point of view. Here, through the phenomenon of parallax and the many points of view, Joyce offers multiple perspectives; no view is absolute. As is characteristic of the contingency of modernism, no meaning is fixed. While some Marxist thinkers dismiss Joyce's work as a retreat into the subjective, his work increasingly displays an effort to transcend the arbitrary category of the subject in fiction. This category, the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson tells us, is inscribed in the text through the strategy of containment fixed point of view. Joyce's work continually undermines such containment. In terms of technique as well as content, his writing attempts to transcend fixity and the prison of self as it celebrates fluidity, historical process and intersubjective experience. | |
| dc.format.extent | 86 pages | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/19010 | |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | en_US |
| dc.title | Perspective, point of view, and perception : James Joyce and Frederic Jameson. | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
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