James Joyce, social myth, and heteroglossia

pp. 127-142

in: Tudor Balinisteanu, Violence, narrative and myth in Joyce and Yeats, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

In this chapter I shall examine some of James Joyce's narrative strategies and poetics as means to recreate social agents in the synchronic moment of aesthetic experience of an art text. I will use Mikhail Bakhtin's theorisation of heteroglossia and monoglossia in defining and analysing the process of recreation of social agents through synchronic aesthetic experience. In order to show how such recreation is related to social change, I will use the theory of social myth developed by Georges Sorel.