'Existentialising Joyce' : an existential phenomenological reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses

Abstract

As suggested by its title's terminology, this dissertation involves an existential phenomenological reading (hence, a subjective rendition or interpretation) of two canonical works by the modern Irish author, James Joyce. This is thus a literary case whereby emphasis clearly falls on the selection of the basic theories and the extrication of those specific concepts which are fundamental to the chosen, and preferred, interpretation of the texts. Presence of philosophical argumentation has constituted an effective tool in the illustration of the saliency of the literary essence, explaining why much attention has been dedicated to the perceptional procedure of existing interrelational (philo-literary or literosophical) links. The phenomenological method of analytical inquiry has been appropriated (hence making the reading phenomenological) owing to this work's thematic concern: the consciousness of the being of beings as revealed by means of individual (involving a subject) and intersubjective (multiple subjects) experiences. In terms of existentialist theory, just as phenomenology enables ontology (that is, the existential individual's study of his own being via the phenomenological method), equally phenomenological is this reading or philosophical mode of interpretation in focusing on the ontological structure of Joyce's beings.