A reading of selected writings of James Joyce in relation to the works of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari)

Chapter One consists in a more complete survey of the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on the works of James Joyce than has previously been available, together with an overview of Deleuzian philosophy. The focus in the first chapter is on Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari's reading of philosophers and writers alike as 4 symptornatologists' of their times and the ethico-political beliefs which they implicitly share with Joyce. I relate this to Hardt and Negri's political speculations. The conceptual 'tools' which make up 'schizoanalysis' are set out. The second chapter uses these tools in a 'symptomatological' diagnosis by first setting out and then going beyond Joyce's depiction of the 'paralysis' of the populace in Dubliners and A Portrait to his fuller understanding of our problematic situation in modernity depicted and diagnosed in the masochism of Bloom in Ulysses. In Chapter Three, I look at the epiphany, Deleuze's concept of Joyce's 'epiphanic machine', 'duration' as understood by Bergson and Deleuze, and the Deleuzian concept of 'affect' as potentially liberatory insights, after the preceding focus on negative 4 symptornatological' diagnoses. Together with a critique of the prevailing views of Joyce's epiphany I analyse three stories in Dubliners as illustrative of Deleuze's understanding of the concept of the epiphany. In the fourth and fifth chapters I focus on Issy in the Wake read in terms of the 'bird-girl' of A Portrait and couple this with the Deleuzian concept of the 'girl' as a crucial, but misunderstood, node in what can be seen as the 'rhizomatic assemblage' or 'network' constituting the 'epiphanic machine' of the Wake. In Chapter Four, after first setting out the range of readings of Issy available in current Joycean criticism, I look at 'The Mime of Mick Nick and the Maggies' (FW219.18-252.21) in terms of a further Joycean challenge to modernity's 'oedipalising' tendencies through Izod/ Issy. Here, I place a final emphasis on the significance of incest and the incest taboo in 'the Mime' as the culmination of Joyce's 'symptomatological' diagnosis of modernity, and in counterbalancing this, his use of the 'affect' of colour to offer us a productive 'line of flight'. In Chapter Five I recapitulate on Deleuze's highlighting of the letter in his positive comments on the Wake and then, by using some established discussions in Joycean criticism as an introduction, engage in a reading of Issy's letter (FW 279F 1) as the Wakean 'line of flight' by reading 'her' as liberatory 'desiring machine' with all of its ethico-political potentialities.