James Joyce, Catholicism and heresy : with specific reference to Giordano Bruno

Abstract

In this thesis I explore the complex nature of James Joyce's relationship with Giordano Bruno in The Day of the Rabblement, Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. I employ an historicist methodology, and examine Joyce's encounter with Bruno in the context of the discursive environment of contemporary Roman Catholicism, specifically in relation to the triumph of Ultramontanism within the Church and the emergence and suppression of Roman Catholic Modernism. I argue that an historicist examination of this relationship provides an extremely effective means of realising some of the urgency and offensiveness of Joyce's critical engagement with contemporary Catholicism. I discuss the manner in which Joyce's encounter with Bruno's writings and legacy in the 1900s steeled him in his own struggle with Catholic orthodoxy, and I explore the significance of the heretical trace of Bruno's philosophical and cosmological writings in Joyce's novels from 1904 to 1922.