Philip Kitcher

Joyce's Kaleidoscope (eBook, ePUB)

An Invitation to Finnegans Wake

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

James Joyce's Ulysses, once regarded as obscure and obscene, is now viewed as one of the masterpieces of world literature. Yet Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, to which he devoted seventeen years, remains virtually unread, except by scholarly specialists. Its linguistic novelties, apparently based on an immense learning that few can share, make it appear impenetrable. Joyce's Kaleidoscope attempts to dissolve the darkness and to invite lovers of literature to engage with Finnegans Wake. Philip Kitcher proposes that the Wake has at its core an age-old philosophical question, "What makes a life worth living?", and that Joyce explores that question from the perspective of someone who feels that a long life is now ending. So the complex dream language is a way of investigating issues that are hard to face directly; the reader is invited to struggle with the novel's aging dreamer who seeks reassurance about the worth of what he has done and been. Joyce finds his way to reassurance. The sweeping music and the high comedy of Finnegans Wake celebrate the ordinary doings of ordinary people. With great humanity and a distinctive brand of humanism, Joyce points us to the things that matter in our lives. His final novel is a festival of life itself. From this perspective, the supposedly opaque, or nonsensical, language opens up as a rich source for the reader's reflections: though readers won't all approach it the same way, or with the same set of references, there is meaning in it for everyone. Kitcher's detailed study of the entire text brings out its musical resonances and its musical structures. It analyzes the novel overall while bringing deep insight to the reading of key individual passages. This engaging guide will aid readers not just to make sense of the novel, but to relish the remarkable accomplishment of Joyce's least appreciated work.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. April 2009
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780199886500
• Artikelnr.: 38126794

Autorenporträt

Currently John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, Philip Kitcher is a former President of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is also the first recipient of the Prometheus Prize of the American Philosophical Association. His previous books include The Advancement of Science (OUP); The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities; Science, Truth, and Democracy (OUP); In Mendel's Mirror; and Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner's Ring.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgements
Awakening
So soft this morning, ours
His reignbolt's shot
Respectable
Nayman of Noland
Crossmess parzel
Life's robulous rebus
Three score and ten toptypsical readings
The hubbub caused in Edenborough
The unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude
Everybody heard their plaint
Tell me more
Loud, heap miseries upon us
The tasks above are as the flasks below
From Liff away
The four of us and sure, thank God, there are no more of us
A picture primitive
Lightbreakfastbringer
Arise, sir ghostus!
Male and female, unmask we hem
The keys to. Given!

Rezensionen

Philip Kitcher is just the person we need to rein in a virtuoso performance that threatens at every turn to spin out of control. There's no novel more in need of, and more worthy of, a philosophical perspective, and Kitcher, himself a virtuoso devotee of literature, will henceforth have provided Joyce's summa its firm foundation. Paul Fry, Yale University