tailieunhanh - James Joyce and Aesthetic Gnosticism

Therefore, the dilemma of aesthetic experience is, as the notion suggests, a double bind. On the one hand, aesthetic experience is universal; it is 'for everyone'. It is, to use the language of Kant, the product of an aesthetic judgement of taste, 'which can make a rightful claim upon everyone's assent'. 2 If it does not possess this universality, then it loses its unique c haracter and significance. For what makes aesthetic experience so significant—so revolutionary even—is that all of us have the capacity for it simply by being human. . | James Joyce and Aesthetic Gnosticism THOMAS H. LANDESS The plight of the artist in the modem world has been the topic of too much fiction poetry and commentary to require extensive definition. I would only point out what is already obvious to members of the academy that the haunting sense of alienation attributed to urban residents of the sixties and seventies was precisely analyzed and rendered by a number of poets and novelists even before the turn of the century and between 1900 and 1950 virtually every major literary figure addressed himself to this question. Among the most important of these was James Joyce one of the few genuinely influential figures in the development of twentieth-century fictional technique. His three novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Ulysses and Finnegan s Wake mirror as well as render the significant plunge into the pool of self that has been a predominant subject of the novel since the late Victorian period. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are undoubtedly the most ambitious of Joyce s works for in their radical departure from conventional modes of narration they suggest the triumph of individual consciousness over the traditional ordering of action the subjugation of time and space by the active imagination in league with the will. To a lesser degree A Portrait of the Artist suggests the same modernist tendencies though its meaning is rendered more often in discourse than in the implications of formal complexity and for this reason Portrait Joyce s first novel provides US with one of the purest examples in modem literature of the gnostic impulse as it manifests itself in the artistic imagination. On its most obvious level the central action of the novel is concerned with the intellectual and spiritual growth of Stephen Dedalus a pattern of development that seems to some critics to include no more than an abnormally painful childhood followed by adolescent rebellion maturity and a satisfying sense of true vocation. To such .