ABSTRACT
The arguments between man and world, the spiritual core of all great novels, becomes in Joyce, a great poetic-philosophical revelation about the inner and outer world, about subject and object, about matter, space, and time. They are the problems of the present philosophical and physical theories. In the April 1929 issue of Life and Letters, Cyril Connolly's The Position of Joyce reviews the fragmentary publication of Anna Livia Plurabelle, referring to Einstein and his popularization in conjunction with the incomprehensibility of modern literature. The article finds continuity between Ulysses and Work In Progress in their strange languages. Yet, despite Connolly's claim that Work in Progress is an absorbing failure, he is nonetheless open to the new literature. The treatment of space-time and other literary elements in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is connected to the discourse of renewal that had been such a prominent feature of literary culture since before the Great War.
