James Joyce and German Theory

Book excerpt: James Joyce's aesthetic theories, as explicated by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in the Scylla and Charybdis chapter of Ulysses, have generally been assumed to be grounded in Aristotle and Aquinas. Indeed, Stephen mentions those thinkers especially in Portrait, at the same time as he rejects Romantic notions. This book investigates the extent to which Joyce's theories as well as his practice, beginning with his critical writings and Stephen Hero, are indebted to early German Romanticism. The allusions, affinities, and analogies, as well as differential relationships between the Joycean oeuvre and texts of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schiegel, and Novalis are often palpable, sometimes tentative, but clearly present in most of his works, including Finnegans Wake.