Abstract
Abstract This thesis investigates James Joyce’s political engagement with the oppressive forces in the making of Irish national consciousness in light of postcolonial perspectives. In addition to British colonialism and Irish nationalism, Joyce critiques the power lying in between: the complicity of native intelligentsia, which makes for the paralysis of Irish national consciousness. This research consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I adopt Edward W. Said’s theory of racialization to survey the Irish colonial pathologies, emphasizing the ideological construction of Irish “otherness.” By linking the colonial oppressive forces with Joyce’s colonized Dubliners, I illustrate the colonial pathologies left behind among the Irish is psychologically internalized. In the second chapter, I employ Benedict Anderson’s national discourse as a means to verify the concept of nation to the Irish by going through the political history of Ireland in Joyce’s Ireland. To explore Joyce’s ambivalent attitude in engaging with Irish nationalism, I elucidate Joyce’s repudiation of Irish nationalism for its claim concerning essentialism and parochialism, oppressing the Irish. In the third chapter, I apply Michel Foucault’s power/ knowledge discourse in association with Antonio Gramsci’s theory of “Hegemony” to reveal the complicity of Irish native intelligentsia. Joyce’s intellectual representatives exemplify Irish intelligentsia’s active manipulation on knowledge-production in the construction of consensual hegemony among the Irish. By analyzing the three camps of power penetrating Joyce’s narratives, I reexamine Joyce’s impassioned demand for Irish collective national consciousness. Other than the powers operated by states, the incoherence of Irish national consciousness concerns primarily with the collusive intellectual complicity.