James Joyce: The Limits of Modernism and the Realms of the Literary Text

Abstract

James Joyce oversaw the modern novel through its evolution of various narrative modes. Such movement takes us from realistic fiction (the kind of slice-of-life portraits that we have in Dubliners) to the literature of self-consciousness and the indeterminate that we find in Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s development as a novelist thus recapitulates — indeed replicates — the evolution of the modern novel. Joyce’s work is a microcosm of the macrocosm — proof that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny — and Joyce is the paradigmatic modern.¹