Irish for dummies: James Joyce, the poetics of politics, and an Irish tradition

My dissertation regards James Joyce as a post-colonial Writer whose famous linguistic experimentation disrupts not only English (as many critics have noted), the oppressor's language, but also the very discourse of Irish re-appropriations of “native traditions” in which so many critics have seen him working. By calling attention to itself through puns, portmanteau words, palindromes, and, especially, to texts that compare ironically with his own, Joyce's language is subject to multiple interpretations and revision. These techniques give agency to the colonized by dismantling established notions of genre and language use and through Irish characters' comic survival. Because Joyce was acutely sensitive to language's ability to create identity, to oppress and to liberate, his artist characters always contend with the ethical dilemmas of language. Joyce steps into the tradition of the medieval Irish artist, or file , a heroic figure praised as “truly Irish” during the Gaelic Revival for his ability to create identity with narratives about nation and clan that adhered to strict form or obliterate it through biting satire. Joyce does the latter. Joyce ruins hegemonic categorizations of cultural identity and poetic form by mocking the textual elements of medieval Irish poetry and contemporary literature that sought to portray a “true” Ireland. His artists question the English construction of the Irish. When Irish identity is defined as only Other than English, however, Joyce's texts emphasize their textuality: stylistic acrogbatics and comic elements dismantle monologic discourse, revealing Joyce's and his artists' condescension toward narrowly defined race and nationality. These elements of Irish nationalism thus only mimic their colonizers and come ultimately from them, a situation that Joyce regarded as oppressive, ironic, and a good reason for self-exile. Joyce's alternative “imagined communities” exist in unpredictable and uproariously funny texts that act as contact zones where identities and meanings are always multiple and liberating.