Time, the river, and the mountain : ecology and technology in Finnegans Wake
No Thumbnail Available
Authors
Meeting name
Sponsors
Date
Journal Title
Format
Thesis
Subject
Abstract
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI SYSTEM--COLUMBIA AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This paper broadly investigates Finnegans Wake's resonance with ecological and environmental themes. It reads the motif of recirculation in the novel as central to the author's critique of modernity. Joyce sets up an opposition between natural recirculation -- embodied by the Wakean heroes of time, the river, and the mountain -- and modernity/modernization, represented in the novel by technology and by humanity's exploitation of the natural world. Although an opposition is established between them, the Wake often harmonizes the natural world and the human one. In an age when theorists predict that we have entered a new geological epoch -- the Anthropocene, a time when humans have clearly left their stamp on the natural world in an irrevocable fashion -- the Wake's harmonizing of the natural and the human might be thought to augur the development of genres meant to interrogate our current predicament, namely climate and Anthropocene fictions.
Table of Contents
DOI
PubMed ID
Degree
M.A.
Thesis Department
Rights
Access to files is restricted to the University of Missouri--Columbia