Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation

Download or read book Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation written by Vivian Heller and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism has long been seen as either a symptom of decadence or a sign of emancipation. Vivian Heller argues that Joyce's writing cannot be categorized as either decadent or emancipatory because it is predicated on the dialectical intimacy of these two terms. Heller relies on Joyce's changing use of epiphany to trace the arc of his development, focusing on the negative epiphanies of Dubliners, the relativistic epiphanies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the retrospective epiphanies of Ulysses.