THE LANGUAGE OF DREAMS: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF NEOLOGISM AND STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE

In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce uses made-up words and stream-of-consciousness narration to create a dreamlike linguistic atmosphere that imitates and subverts unconscious mental processes and conventional culture. The novel's neologisms—formed through compounding, portmanteaux, and onomatopoeia—function as expressions of dream logic and psychological richness, while the stream-of-consciousness narrative blurs linearity and fixed identity, presenting consciousness as fragmented, recursive, and mythic. Joyce also reworks motifs of the Irish Literary Revival, deconstructing conventional senses of national identity through radical style. The analysis shows that Joyce's language is not merely a medium but the very content of meaning, redefining narrative as an enactment of cultural memory and unconscious association.

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Abstract

The present research examines James Joyce's Finnegans Wake from a stylistic perspective, with a specific emphasis on two of its most striking narrative strategies: neologism and stream-of-consciousness. The study examines how Joyce creates an unconscious-like linguistic atmosphere that imitates yet subverts unconscious mental processes and conventional culture. Based on the stylistic model of Leech and Short (2007) and psychoanalytic models of Freud and Jung, the study illustrates how Joyce's made-up words derived from compounding, portmanteaux, and onomatopoeia work not only as lexical innovation but as an expression of dream logic and psychological richness. Likewise, the stream-of-consciousness narrative of the novel blurs linearity and fixed identity, representing consciousness as fragmented, recursive, and mythic. The paper also investigates how Joyce reworks the motifs of the Irish Literary Revival, deconstructing conventional senses of national identity through radical style. The results emphasise how Joyce's language is not a medium but the very content of meaning, redefining narrative as an enactment of cultural memory and unconscious association. This study adds to modernist scholarship, literary stylistics, and Irish studies by providing a sophisticated insight into the ways in which experimental language is able to reconfigure both narrative shape and cognitive structure.