Critical Distance: Fragmentation From Friedrich Schlegel to James Joyce

Dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo (1992)
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Abstract

The study traces the development of the fragment from the German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel to the modern James Joyce. Beginning with Schlegel's theory of the Romantic-fragmentary Novel as the ironic synthesis of spirit and letter, the dissertation explores the way in which Joyce brings the two opposites together on the level of character-formation, word-structure and the alphabetic letter. ;Central to Schlegel's concept of the fragment is the impossible presentation of the Idea of the work. The work of art as originally conceived by the creator, is an Ideal that can never be fulfilled. No sooner is it concretized than it renders incomplete what has been achieved. In this moment of absence, the work-as-fragment points up its need for completion, or what is the same, its continuous progression towards its unity of letter and spirit. ;Joyce re-thinks this Idealist notion of fragmentation and shows us what happens when the part and the whole, the letter and the spirit, the work and the creative mind are indistinguishable. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of an invisible Artist putting himself into fragmentary characters. Stephen Dedalus's lack of self--epitomized by the Erlebte Rede--becomes emblematic of the omnipresent absence of the self-producing Joycean Artist. In Ulysses the part and the whole are brought together--in a radically plural fashion--in the incompletion of the "Word known to all men." It is the Word-as-World that, caught in the stream of life, doubles even before it is completed. In Finnegans Wake letter and spirit are united in a "point" beyond conception. The alphabetic letter--related as it is to the other letters of the alphabet, and ultimately to the whole universe--is blotted out in its appearance. Thus annihilated before it is written, the Wake's text--and this has been announced by Joyce himself--can no longer be described in terms of the fragment. With the Wake we enter a realm of fragmentation that ends Schlegel's search for the unity of letter and spirit

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