Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Joyce, James, --1882-1941--Criticism and interpretation; Joyce, James, --1882-1941--Knowledge--Music; Joyce, James, --1882-1941--Knowledge--Modernism (Music); Joyce, James, --1882-1941--Themes and motives; Joyce, James, --1882-1941--Ulysses; Joyce, James, --1882-1941; Ulysses (Joyce, James); Art; Modernism (Literature); Modernism (Music); Academic theses; Criticism, interpretation, etc; Music;

Abstract

Since Joyce's rise to critical prominence over the course of the twentieth century, a diverse corpus of scholarship has emerged around the Joyce canon that is nearly as vast and as multifaceted as the works themselves. While many have explored Joyce's affinity for music and his unprecedented synthesis of musical and literary modes, relatively few have examined his works' musical properties in the context of the contemporaneous musical developments of the early avant-garde and jazz movements. This study explores the trajectory of Joyce's engagement with musical forms and techniques, ranging from the primarily allusive relations of his early works to the integral formal and technical musical relationships of his late experimental novels, Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan's Wake (1939). As I explore the link between the dissolution of conventional tonality in music and Joyce's increasingly dissonant and experimental idiom, focusing primarily upon his literary adaptation and appropriation of theoretical, technical, and formal developments specific to the early jazz and serialist movements, I situate these borrowings within a distinctly Modernist tradition, examining not only how the dynamic interplay of the musical and the literary becomes an increasingly integral component of articulating meaning in Joyce's evolving aesthetic, but also how both Joyce's multimodal narratives and the specific contemporaneous musical movements he emulates function as parallel means of articulating meaning and manufacturing coherence in the wake of the breakdown of conventional form and syntax in both disciplines.

Year of Submission

2010

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of English Language and Literature

First Advisor

Samuel Gladden

Second Advisor

Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure

Third Advisor

Jesse Swan

Comments

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Date Original

2010

Object Description

1 PDF file (77 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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