Shelly Harder

Thesis Title: William Blake in James Joyce’s Compositional Practice: Figuring Limitation and Freedom

Supervisor: Jeri Johnson & Seamus Perry

Doctoral Research: My research looks at Blake's contested status and the fragmented and variable transmission of his work in the early twentieth century, and from here I trace Blake’s changing role within Joyce’s portraits of artistic ambition and shifting, self-reflexive interactions with his own compositional practice. This project delineates increasingly ambivalent citations, attentive to predicaments within Blake’s ambition of a liberatory aesthetic, that accompany a shift from Joyce’s early optimism about the efficacy of his art to a commitment to difficulty and obscurity that defy communicative norms.

Research Interests: philosophy and literature; creative process; genetic scholarship