Ulysses and "Among school children": Encountering, and Encounters in, Joyce and Yeats

Abstract

Conclusions seem best when tentative, and it is with that frame of mind that I now try to "wrap up" this project. These two essays on Joyce and Yeats do not overlap perfectly, but there are some areas of reasonable concord. In a broad perspective, both essays have to do with the way that artists portray encounters between individuals in their art. The way they show the self, the artist, interacting with the world of experience I have found to be paramount in interest and perhaps in importance. Perhaps approaching both Yeats and Joyce from this perspective is appropriate, as both seemed to hold similar views about the composition of the individual self. Yeats's theory of the mask is fairly famous, and developed partly form his involvement with the theatre. As Yeats was led towards a view of the self as performance, so Joyce, when depicting in "Circe" the innerworkings of the conscious and subconscious self would choose the form of drama, and the topic of role-playing is touched upon in the Joyce essay. The two essays are in some ways just an examination of how these artists show their players interacting. Considering these encounters seemed to naturally lead to consideration of another encounter: that between author, or text, and reader. In both essays, I tried to derive lessons on how to read each work of art from the work of art itself. I am not exactly sure what kind of literary methodology such a technique might be classified as, but perhaps it could be described as a kind of meta-formalism. One does not simply critique the artwork from a formalist approach, but attempts to derive the proper, or suggested, approach through an analysis of the artwork. This, of course, does not exactly stipulate what methodology guides one's deriving an approach -- which, to be sure, is something to consider -- but perhaps an almost inevitable pitfall when considering these meta-ideas of theory. [33] [From Conclusion]