'of all that ever anywhere wherever was': The all-inclusive Joycean memory in 'Dubliners', 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' (James Joyce, Ireland)

My dissertation focuses on the evolution of Great Memory in the writings of James Joyce, from his early short stories, Dubliners, through its most developed form in Finnegans Wake. In Chapter 1, I have built a referential framework drawing on works in mental science, Theosophy, and Eastern and Western philosophy to illuminate Joyce's ideas about time, space, autobiographical and Great memory, and human identity. Dubliners, the focus of my second chapter, represents Joyce's first extensive experimentation with his ideas about autobiographical and Great memory, and their application within a character's mindscape. The subject of my third chapter is Stephen Dedalus' development into manhood, and his attempt to become artistic creator in relation to Joyce's formulation of Stephen's autobiographical and transpersonal memory in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Chapter 4 is comprised of a close reading of the "Proteus" chapter of Ulysses, in which I trace how Stephen's contemplation of the primal matter of the universe is crucial to Joyce's construction of Great Memory in Ulysses. Joyce's simulation of Leopold Bloom's metempsychotic experiences, the traces of other lives remembered, as they relate to the recomposition of the past through the merging of archetypal identities in his character's interior monologue, are the focus of my fifth chapter. In my sixth chapter, I treat Joyce's presentation of primal patterning through HCE's unconscious, and his fictive recreation of the Akasic Records, the Akasic mound of Wakean memory, which contains the "countlessness of livestories" of the human past. I discuss these patterns in relation to the "Willingdone" and "Pranquean" fables, which articulate Joyce's two major recurring themes, the respective disestablishment and establishment of family life, which is the nucleus of all Joyce's texts. Finally, in my last chapter, I explore Joyce's paradigmatic patterning of establishment and disestablishment by means of his psychic presentation of the power shift in the Earwicker family, when Shaun assumes the mantle of fatherhood from HCE through his incorporation into the Akasic mound in Book III of the Wake. I also treat the patterns as they concern Joyce's recomposition of the memory of Irish history.