Elizabeth Cunningham | The University of Georgia (original) (raw)
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This paper examines the role of excess in Ulysses's "Ithaca" as a catalyst for utopian and dystop... more This paper examines the role of excess in Ulysses's "Ithaca" as a catalyst for utopian and dystopian interiority. In "Hard Facts and Fluid Spaces: 'Ithaca' and the Imperial Archive," Jon Hegglund locates a "third space" apart from Irish localism and British imperialism. Such a space, Hegglund argues, manages to integrate both national and transnational markers in a transcendence of either. This paper will propose a Deleuzian reading of 'Ithaca' as a paradoxical homecoming, one in which being-as-difference allows for a final act of (imperfect) communion. The result is a Joycean fantasy of coherence, in which utopia exists as the negation of, and the synthesis of, temporal and spatial perception. This paper questions whether the excess of "Ithaca's" interrogative mode suggests a utopian consciousness. Is utopia marked by an absence of interiority, or by an abundance of interiority? What role does desire play in utopian space? By locating the unconscious signifiers between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in a utopian third space, how might we approach Ulysses as a text of both immanent and transcendent articulations of experience?
This paper examines the role of excess in Ulysses's "Ithaca" as a catalyst for utopian and dystop... more This paper examines the role of excess in Ulysses's "Ithaca" as a catalyst for utopian and dystopian interiority. In "Hard Facts and Fluid Spaces: 'Ithaca' and the Imperial Archive," Jon Hegglund locates a "third space" apart from Irish localism and British imperialism. Such a space, Hegglund argues, manages to integrate both national and transnational markers in a transcendence of either. This paper will propose a Deleuzian reading of 'Ithaca' as a paradoxical homecoming, one in which being-as-difference allows for a final act of (imperfect) communion. The result is a Joycean fantasy of coherence, in which utopia exists as the negation of, and the synthesis of, temporal and spatial perception. This paper questions whether the excess of "Ithaca's" interrogative mode suggests a utopian consciousness. Is utopia marked by an absence of interiority, or by an abundance of interiority? What role does desire play in utopian space? By locating the unconscious signifiers between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in a utopian third space, how might we approach Ulysses as a text of both immanent and transcendent articulations of experience?