Joyce and the post-love affair: Literature, globalization and the question of the universal

The present study examines James Joyce's Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, and Ulysses to show how their diverging thematic treatments of love challenge our views on the old conceptual binary---the particular versus the universal. From the heyday of New Criticism to the rise of the post-structuralist/post-colonial theories, critics have emphasized, with varying implications, Joyce's ingenious feat in simultaneously juggling and problematizing the contradictory notions of the particular and the universal. My inquiry, which takes the current phenomenon of globalization as the culmination of the expansionary logic of Western capitalism, argues that, by signaling the dangers lying inherent in every libidinally (over-)invested urge toward the universal, Joyce's texts invite us to envision the possibilities of literary praxis based on more concretely particularized, that is, regionalized, ontological formations.; This thesis engages with two crucial aspects of Joyce's canonized legacy: his contemporaneous dialogue with modernism and his Irish status as a cosmopolitan colonial subject. This dual historical situation and the literary battle the author waged against it have undiminished bearings for our globalized era, in which the age-worn discourse of modernization has made its comeback on both sides of the divide separating the First World from the Third, alongside the ideological hegemony of multiculturalism. Though camouflaged by his formal experimentation, Joyce's intensely autobiographical texts attest to the traumatic disjunction constraining the life of an exile from an underdeveloped part of the world. What calls for our attention, in this respect, is not so much the author's signatory laughter(s) or even the literary innovations for which his texts have been traditionally praised. This study explores instead the double vision that enabled his memory of the provincial Ireland on the one hand and his metropolitan existence on the other, through which Joyce gave voice, utilizing his creative vigilance, to the sufferings as well as hopes underwriting increasingly-fragmented individual lives. That split vision remains, more so today than ever, the fundamental framework in which to sketch out futures alternative to the one offered by the universalizing movement of the late capitalism.