Textual awareness: A genetic approach to the late works of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann

A comparative genetic investigation into the writing process of Finnegans Wake, A la recherche du temps perdu, and Doktor Faustus. The metafictional nature of these three literary works is the starting point of Part One ("Genetic and Literary Criticism"): a genetic analysis of the instances in these novels where the writing process becomes thematic. In Part Two ("Genetic and Textual Criticism") a survey of French, German, and Anglo-American editorial traditions is followed by a discussion of several issues in textual criticism on the basis of the works discussed in Part One and the metaphors employed by authors and textual critics. A key issue in this confrontation between literary and textual criticism is the tension between the finished and the unfinished. This tension manifests itself most poignantly in these self-reflexive encyclopaedic novels in which the Faustian ambition to comprehend everything is always accompanied by the---essentially textual---awareness of the impossibility of such an enterprise: whatever the "essence of things" one tries to unveil, it is re-veiled (with text) by the very attempt to do so. This genetic analysis therefore aims at a rapprochement between literary and textual criticism.