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(2012) Literary epiphany in the novel, 1850–1950, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Opening the subject

Joyce and Heidegger on epiphany

Sharon Kim

pp. 31-48

Joyce "invented" epiphany when he was 19 and still in college. Young, cocky, and poor, he wrote down his theory in pieces from 1901–1906, as he set about forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. Joyce would later portray epiphany as a youthful fad or infatuation. In the early twentieth century, however, an august, even "ponderous' (Safranski 410), thinker independently developed a parallel theory of epiphany: Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) (1927) is one of the most significant philosophical works of the last century. Both the edgy novelist and the university professor offered epiphany as an aesthetic counterpoint to the modern technological eye. Both drew upon ancient Greek epiphaneia as a resistance to Roman Catholicism. Moreover, both referred to Thomas Aquinas to explain their theories of epiphany.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1057/9781137021854_2

Full citation:

Kim, S. (2012). Opening the subject: Joyce and Heidegger on epiphany, in Literary epiphany in the novel, 1850–1950, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 31-48.

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