Aspects of James Joyce's Engagement with Jewish Life and the Jewish Religion

Download or read book Aspects of James Joyce's Engagement with Jewish Life and the Jewish Religion written by David Lewis Stone and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation attempts to extend the work of other scholars who have explored James Joyce's interest in Judaism (Ira Nadel's Joyce and the Jews, Neil Davison's James Joyce 'Ulysses' and the Construction of Jewish Identity and Marilyn Reizbaum's James Joyce's Judaic Other). I focus on aspects of his engagement with Jewish life and more especially the Jewish religion that have not received the attention they deserve by these and other scholars. To that end, I discuss his engagement with the tradition of ghetto-writing as found in German in the works of Leopold Sacher-Masoch and developed in English in those of Israel Zangwill. I offer the most detailed account to date of his knowledge of Jewish Biblical hermeneutics. Frederic Farrar's Life and Work of St. Paul (1879) is highlighted for the first time as an important source of Jewish knowledge for Joyce. The importance of midrashic hermeneutics to an understanding of Finnegans Wake and its notebooks, is discussed in detail. Particular attention is paid to his use of certain types of word play, gematriya, notarikon and multilingual punning. A particular preoccupation of this dissertation is Joyce's growing interest in Judaism and Jewish religious life as his career progressed. In exploring the reasons for this deepening engagement, I ask what Joyce's interest in Jewish festivals might tell us about his interest in ritual more generally. Here I draw on the work of the sociologist Emile Durkheim and the paediatrician turned psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott. The references to Jewish religious observances, race and the rituals of Passover and Tabernacles in Joyce's latter works are discussed in the light of recent scholarship by a range of Joyceans, including Len Platt and Vincent Cheng.