ABSTRACT
“James Joyce and the Primitive Sublime: From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake” analyzes cultural transformations amid the globalized dislocation of early twentieth-century Europe, scrutinizing racial otherness and the function of African figures in the works of James Joyce. For Joyce, the illuminating tension of opposition with these seeming others is not found in simple contrast but rather in intimate affiliations with the primitive other within and beyond Ireland's borders. Building upon early images in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's allusions to the primitive sublime Ulysses center on Roger Casement's 1904 Congo Report. Joyce's engagement with the primitive sublime becomes even more acute in his Finnegans Wake, again using Casement as a touchstone amid a succession of references to the embodiments associated with Africa and the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931.
