Modernism's World Drama: Joyce, Wagner, and the Anti-Systemic Stirrings of a Global Artwork

Abstract: Two of James Joyce's earliest essays identify a kind of artwork that would remain a model for his fiction: the world drama. Joyce's notion of the world drama built upon an aspect of Richard Wagner's theoretical writing that has been largely forgotten: the program for a revolutionary, nonnational artwork. Joyce reimagined this program within the conditions of colonial Ireland and an increasingly international print culture, conceiving of a work that is oriented toward the world at large and meant to articulate a revolutionary consciousness for its audience. Joyce's works of fiction can be understood, in these terms, as world dramas, which is one of the reasons for their influence. The history of the world drama reveals how the effort to create a revolutionary world-oriented artwork spanned international modernism, evolving as it passed from Wagner to Joyce and then later to artists such as Sergei Eisenstein and Mulk Raj Anand.