| By defining literature as a form of creative criticism, this dissertation raises some fundamental questions about features and functions of poetic reasoning. A model of metaphor is developed under the term, "The Law of the Shadow," calling specific attention to the coexistence of similarity and dissimilarity, association and dissociation, in contrast to conventional models of metaphor, such as "tenor" and "vehicle" (I. A. Richards) or "theme" and "phoros" (Chaim Perleman). James Joyce's strategies of mediation are foregrounded by way of the idea introduced here of "gnomonic metaphor," where a connection is made indirectly through two vehicles, much like "combination shots" in billiards. Earlier critics have explored the idea of the "gnomon" (particularly Phillip Herring and Bernard Benstock) in examples where missing elements must be inferred or reconstructed. Later David Weir developed a model of gnomonic narrative (based on contraries & contrasts suggested by Giordano Bruno) that facilitates mediation of inner and outer reality and related contraries.; Central to the idea of literature as creative criticism is the view that literary works themselves provide the means for a more flexible, comprehensive, and exact way of thinking about human problems. The function of gnomonic metaphor is not only to provide a richer means for making connections, but to make visible partial or limited ways of reading that, in effect, colonize our thinking and limit creative change, leading us into repeating patterns of choice that are inherently destructive and forms of criticism that are inherently limited and partial. Discussing examples from Joyce and Chinese poetry, from Hemingway and Faulkner, the dissertation argues that literary creation is an inter-textual and historical dialogue and debate, inherently critical in nature, among books that talk to each other and talk to us. The whole dissertation argues strenuously against the idea, first offered by T. S. Eliot, that Joyce's Ulysses was just a parallel to Homer's Odyssey, to urge instead that by poetic reasoning, and through strategies such as "gnomonic metaphor," Joyce challenges and talks back to Western literary tradition through criticism of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare, not just on technical literary grounds, but in consequential ethical terms as well. |
