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Going Down the Flow of Life Universität Augsburg Dissertation Going down the Flow of Life A Transcultural, Ecocritical Approach to Joyce’s Ulysses and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn vorgelegt von Xialin Liu zur Erlangung des Grads einer Doktorin der Amerikanistik (Dr. phil.) an der Philologisch-Historischen Fakultät 2015 Erstgutachter: Herr Prof. Dr. Hubert Zapf Zweitgutachter: Herr PD Dr. Timo Müller Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 11. Mai 2015 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 3 2. An Ecological Literary Criticism .................................................................................................................... 5 2.1 An Organic, Dynamic and Ecological World View ............................................................................... 5 2.1.1 From Descartes’ Dualism to Newton’s Mechanism ....................................................................... 5 2.1.2 Deconstruction ............................................................................................................................... 7 2.1.3 Heraclitus and the Book of Changes ............................................................................................... 9 2.2 Ecocriticism: Literature as Cultural Ecology ...................................................................................... 13 2.3 The Water Element in Literature as Cultural Ecology ......................................................................... 17 3. Ulysses: “The Mind is its Own Sea” ............................................................................................................ 22 3.1 Joyce’s Stream of Consciousness ........................................................................................................ 27 3.1.1 Stream of Consciousness .............................................................................................................. 28 3.1.2 Self and the Flow of Life: Integration .......................................................................................... 30 3.1.3 Dublin: Local Place, Concrete Life .............................................................................................. 38 3.1.4 Art and Life: Static or Kinetic? .................................................................................................... 45 3.1.5 The Arranger: a Flow of Free Mental Energy .............................................................................. 47 3.2 Break the Frame: The Cultural-critical Metadiscourse ....................................................................... 50 3.2.1 Play and Parody of the Representational System ......................................................................... 50 3.2.1.1 Word-play .................................................................................................................................. 50 3.2.1.2 “Cyclops”: Decentralization of Narrative.................................................................................. 54 3.2.2 Parody of Bourgeois Commodity Culture .................................................................................... 58 3.2.3 The Nightmare of History ............................................................................................................ 64 3.2.4 Deconstruction: “Chaos” of the Real ........................................................................................... 71 3.2.4.1 “Oxen of the Sun”: Deconstruction of Literary Canon and “Chaos” of Civilization ................ 72 3.2.4.2 “Circe”: “Chaos” of the Unconscious ....................................................................................... 77 3.2.4.3 “Ithaca”: Deconstruction of the Hard Rock of Reason .............................................................. 83 3.3 Formless Form: The Reintegrative Inter-discourse ............................................................................. 87 3.3.1 Telos vs. Chaos ............................................................................................................................. 89 3.3.2 Formless Form .............................................................................................................................. 91 3.3.3 The Inexhaustible ......................................................................................................................... 93 3.4 Life is Relation .................................................................................................................................... 94 4. Huckleberry Finn: A Ceaseless River ......................................................................................................... 100 4.1 The River of Life: The Inexhaustible ................................................................................................ 100 4.2 A Critical Force: The Cultural-critical Metadiscourse ...................................................................... 101 4.2.1 A Journey for Escaping from Slavery ......................................................................................... 102 4.2.2 The River Societies: Hypocrisy, Feud and Murder .................................................................... 103 4.2.3 Sherburn ..................................................................................................................................... 105 4.2.4 In a World Where Frauds Thrive ................................................................................................ 107 4.3 A Vital Force: The Imaginative Counter-discourse ........................................................................... 111 4.3.1 Two Believers in Natural Spirit .................................................................................................. 111 4.3.2 A Lonely and Divided Soul ........................................................................................................ 113 4.3.3 Revitalization ............................................................................................................................. 115 4.3.3.1 Life is Relation ........................................................................................................................ 115 4.3.3.2 Revitalization in the Life on the River .................................................................................... 120 1 4.3.4 The Narrative of a Native Son .................................................................................................... 123 4.4 A Ceaseless River .............................................................................................................................. 129 5. Going down the Flow of Life: Ulysses and Huckleberry Finn .................................................................... 136 5.1 Water: The Ecological Structure of Ulysses and Huckleberry Finn .................................................. 136 5.2 Interrelatedness of All Things in the Flow of Life ............................................................................ 143 6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 150 Literature ..................................................................................................................................................... 155 2 1. Introduction There are varied ways of looking at literature. Some say that literature is a product of human imagination for expressing the artist’s self, and others would see it as a reflection of social reality as well as the objective world and thus a useful tool of social criticism; or some may simply think of it as a pure art of language, premised that a text exists in its own realm despite any context of history, class, gender, race, and so on. So what is literature? Is it a mere cultural phenomenon, an art which exists in its own right or more than this? Through the eco- critical analyses of two literary works, this thesis aims to convey a new understanding of lit- erature. As a new theory of literary criticism, ecocriticism links the cultural concept of literature to the broad realm of nature. This critical theory is based on an ecological, holistic world view. This theory derives from ecocritics’ contemplation of the tension between man, society and nature as well as the split between culture and nature, spirit and matter, mind and body in modern times. Therefore it intends to break the limitation of the dualistic discourses dominat- ing in Western tradition. Literature is not a mere cultural phenomenon and does not only bring us an aesthetic feeling—it leads us further to a broader world. As cultural ecology, literature is capable of healing the dualistic oppositions between culture and nature and between mind and body and functions as a special way of cognition, a special way of understanding of the world and the self. In the theoretical part of the thesis, there is an exploration of the philosophical thoughts behind the traditional dualistic, mechanistic world view in the West and ecological, holistic world view that links early Greek philosophers, the Book of Changes from China and modern ecocriticism. And water as the basic element of all ecosystems is introduced to explore its key function in the dynamic process of life as well as in the discursive functions of cultural ecol- ogy. This provides a theoretical basis for the following literary analyses. The water element
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