Providence in the marketplace : Vico's philology and the immanence of language in Joyce's later narrative

Abstract

During the mid to late 1980s Joyce-Vico scholarship took a radical change of course. The tum coincided with the publication of two seminal volumes in English and a lesser known article in Italian exploring, each from a different angle, the impact of Vico's "Poetic Metaphysics" on Joyce's compositional method. Since then, Vichian readings of Finnegans Wake have all but abandoned the study of historical patterns to focus on the themes of language, memory and imagination. (The most notable contributions in this tradition are Lorraine Weir's elaboration of a joint Vico-Joycean semiotics modelled on Roland Barthes's theory of performative reading; and, more recently, Peter Mahon's discussion of the overlap between Vico's sensory imagination and the Wake's peculiar staging of the scene of writing.)