The Sensual Philosophy
Subtitle: Joyce and the Aesthetics of Mysticism
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: January 1998
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 156
ISBN-13: 9780299156206
Subjects: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval; Novels, other prose & writers: from c 1900 -; Joyce, James, 1882-1941; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; British Isles; Joyce, James; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; 1882-1941; 20th century; Aesthetics; History; Ireland; Joyce, James,; Knowledge; Medievalism; Middle Ages, 600-1500; Mysticism; Senses and sensation in literature
Description: The Sensual Philosophy offers a richly illuminating reading of James Joyce's canon, placing his texts in the context of the medieval mystical tradition that had influenced and interested Joyce since his school days. In exploring Joyce's indebtedness to the artistic and theological culture of the Middle Ages, Colleen Jaurretche also identifies the origins of modernist aesthetics in medieval forms of representation.

Jaurretche traces the development of Joyce's mystical aesthetic through a critical examination of his novels, culminating in the supreme negative mystical aestheticism of Finnegans Wake. In this novel, Joyce's "sensual philosophy" - the subjective epistemological foundation of art - establishes the construction of personality, representation, and art, surmounting the divisions of psychology and physiology, of subject and object, in the "night" of the negative mystical tradition.