Abstract

In his struggle to overcome anxiety over time, change, and decay, man has consistently turned to myth-making and story-telling. What man is searching is an alternative to the passive acceptance of the process of dying. To counteract this anxiety the poet and the philosopher, spokesmen for humanity, seek to create a sense of permanence in a world of constant change--a balance that would give the illusion of control over what mortals have no power to control. ;This alternative is often presented to the reader in the form of a revelation in which space is transcended and time appears to stop for an instant. Through a vision--or epiphany--the poet thus creates through words a sense of immortality while escaping into art. Memory and love, expressions of human thought, emotion, and creativity, illustrate the human potential and are proofs that we have existed. They are the experience the artist is trying to immortalize. ;This study examines the way memory and love are used by Plato, George Seferis, and James Joyce, toward this purpose; it examines how language is recreated for each writer's specific purposes, and is trying to gain insight into the way the authors' philosophical, metaphysical, and aesthetic approaches illuminate their distinct sensibilities and views of life. I have chosen as my main texts Plato's Phaedrus, Seferis's poems, and Joyce's Ulysses, because of these writers' manifold preoccupation with language and writing, myth, history, and time, and mainly in view of the prominence these authors assign memory, love, and language. Central to my discussion is also their interest in mythical intertextuality, the ambiguity and indeterminacy of language, the duality of things as a source of balance, and writing and speech as means of representation of human thought and emotions--memory and love. The similarities and differences in orientation, vision, and form that link and also separate my three authors are assessed through the textual, philosophical, symbolical, and aesthetic dimensions of these themes