Abstract

History is one of the subjects that Finnegans Wake continually pursues and develops, problematizing it through its particular narratives. It cannot be separated from the novel's extraordinary text. ;The purpose of this study is to explore how the particular nature of textuality and concepts of history function in Finnegans Wake; more specifically, how the paradoxical interweaving of contradictory qualities are used to present the notion of history. The intertext seems to require two essential processes for its working: differentiation, and interaction between differences. Through the paradoxical textuality of Finnegans Wake apparently contradictory but in fact complementary operations write a universal story. The myriad voices in the text produce consonance as well as dissonance. ;The dissertation has two parts. Part I focuses on the idea of dispersion, concentrating on the problem of how history is decentered through contextualization. Part II emphasizes the contradictory quality of cohesion. Part I finds that "true" history is full of "noise" that sounds insubstantial, hollow, and vain. History is never static or stable; it changes constantly. In Part II history is defined through its essential, vital, and multi-dimensional affirming force; it becomes both universal mechanism and the energy source that moves history. ;The "ex-centric" textuality of Finnegans Wake deeply questions such humanistic assumptions as value, order, meaning, control, and identity. The skepticism of the text toward preestablished beliefs is revealed in the dissolution of a conventional novelistic scheme. But dissolution does not mean that the work is devoid of organization. Linkages connect the fragmentary stories of the work; only the text follows a logic different from that used in a traditional novel. Rather than progressing along a linear pattern, it moves according to a human impulse which generates diverse versions of stories. Hence the narrative of the work is both discontinuous and repetitive. ;Through its particular textuality Finnegans Wake provides a dynamic history: through perplexity the demystification of history challenges frozen reality. Literary strategies such as indeterminacy and reiteration question given truth. There is no final and unrevisable reading. History in Finnegans Wake is an ongoing process or reordering and rearranging the mutable textual inferences in it