Literature and Politics

Recognition of the political potency of Joyce’s “applied aesthetics” is found as early as some initial reactions to Dubliners and to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but study of their political dimension proper, began with Colin MacCabe’s 1978 study of James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, which investigated political and philosophical purposes in Joyce’s inventions in literary language, structure and styles. Since the emergence of New Historicism, the study of “semi-colonial Joyce” and related studies of social and cultural context, we have learnt much about Joyce’s range of sociopolitical targets. Relatively little attention however has been paid to Joyce’s philosophical and artistic clashes with the Roman Catholic Church, despite the fact they dominate his earliest writings. The proposition is explored that Joyce’s revolution of the word can also be understood as a philosophical entanglement with, and attack on, the wielding of the Word, figured in the pungent words of Stephen Dedalus in Stephen Hero as an indissoluble collusion of the secular and the spiritual: where “Caesar confesses Christ and Christ confesses Caesar”.