ABSTRACT
In considering the Irish contribution to modernist literature in English, everyone have available an all-too-prominent political timetable in the events which led from the demand for Irish home rule within the United Kingdom to the establishment of the Irish Free State. Joyce constantly approaches his task as fictionalist conscious of the dual character of modernist anxiety, and his awareness is heightened by his experience of history as something other than academic facticity. In the preface to The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson emphasises the virtually transhistorical imperative of dialectical thought. The organicist metaphors which constitute Joyce's political longing culminate in 'the general paralysis of an insane society', which resounds with the medical shorthand for the terminal stages of severe syphilitic infection. Joyce's mimicry, in Dubliners as much as in Finnegans Wake, mocks a mockery. Thus it draws the reader towards his creation of an order which is not competitive and in which life and art positively define each other.
