Abstract

Abstract:

This essay considers Joyce's literary response to the 1916 Easter Rising by examining how Ulysses and Finnegans Wake establish a dynamic participatory space in which readers might negotiate the meaning of the historical event. The "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses, in its mock-accounts of the Keogh-Bennett boxing match and the Irish Volunteer garrison at Jacob's Biscuit Factory, illuminates the misuse of figurative language, the classic trope of catachresis, awakening readers to the rhetorical underpinning of the Irish revolution. Expanding this work of metaphorical interpretation and historical re-assessment, Finnegans Wake resituates the core metaphors of the Easter Rising within mythic and super-historical contexts.

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