UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020 DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0095 PTCD/FER-FIL/32042/2017In two books (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake), an itinerant-revolutionaryartist-city-dweller created, what I call, chaosmopolitanism. In collidingchaos with order (cosmos), the word “cosmopolitan” for the urbandweller is not sufficient. As is well known, James Joyce is both the localwriter officially dedicating his art to a single city; and the world authorappropriating so many other facets of cities, languages and internationalcultural literary figures and motifs and weaving them into a revolutionaryliterature. In his work, he was a master of expressing the modernexperience on a grand scale of fragmentation, reconfiguration, and thedisorientation and reorientation of space, time and identities in the city;in his life, he moved from one European city to the next: from Dublinto Pula to Trieste to Zurich, and then from Zurich back to Trieste andunto Paris, and then escaping Nazi-occupied Paris to return to Zurich. Isee Joyce’s “chaosmos” as the expression of his art and vision and whichemerges out of experiencing the myth, logos and life of the modern cityand the exiled self of modernity.publishersversionpublishe
