Psychogeography in Ulysses (original) (raw)
Our evolved mammalian brain has developed the ability to use somatic 'cues' to interpret an assumed interior emotional state, known in cognitive psychology circles as 'mind-reading' or 'Theory of Mind'. In conjunction with the Theory of Mind, this paper will explore the concept of Metarepresentation, that is the brain's ability to keep track of who said what to whom and sometimes where or when it was said and for what purpose. Our mind-reading and metarepresentational abilities enable us to find an albeit rather halting path through Joyce's labyrinthine novel, even if we have to gingerly retrace our steps a frightening number of times en route to the heart of
Textual And Paratextual Vectors of Attention in James Joyce's Ulysses
Katalin Kálay (ed.), The Arts of Attention, Budapest, L’Harmattan, 2016, pp. 89-99.
Few works in literary history have earned as much attention as James Joyce’s Ulysses. How do we explain this? There is of course the novel’s inherent textual quality. Joycean text requests uncommon readerly attention for even the most basic operations of narrative understanding. If immanent analysis reveals high intra- and intertextual complexity, another question is: how comes we care so much? Why does this novel call for a virtually unlimited number of referential assertions, and more importantly, why do critics so eagerly obey this call? This paper argues that Ulysses’s massive success on the market of literary attention is grounded in two separable but intrinsically linked layers of creation: paratextual and textual technique, the former framing our reception of the latter. It characterizes Ulysses as its authors conscious attempt to produce an ultimate work of hermeneutic surplus, a text virtually limitless and yet entirely meaningful. Attention management is the crucial element of such a production.
Bloom's Situated Mind in James Joyce's Ulysses: Decoding Character in a Social Storyworld
2016
During the 1920s, James Joyce remarked that classical writers "show you a pleasant exterior but ignore the inner construction, the pathological and psychological body which our behaviour and thought depend on. Comprehension is the purpose of literature, but how can we know human beings if we continue to ignore their most vital functions?" 1 This thesis responds to Joyce's endeavour, using a theoretical framework derived from recent research in cognitive science to analyse human action and interaction as portrayed by literary character in Ulysses. Accordingly, it is interested in the narrative devices Joyce uses to realistically construct his protagonist Leopold Bloom. It questions how cognitive science can further illuminate, respond to, and rearticulate both how and why these devices work as they do.
Interlingual Metempsychosis: Translating Intertextuality in James Joyce’s Ulysses
Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2009
Highlighting in its very title the unlimited dimensions of intertextuality, James Joyce"s Ulysses selfconsciously establishes itself as a text that seems impossible to translate without losing essential elements. Ulysses, (in)famous for its multiple styles that in themselves seem to give shape and content to the various themes at hand, is a text for which the term "intertextuality" seems to fall short. With a particular eye for the problems that occur when translating intertextual elements of Ulysses into Dutch and other languages and following Fritz Senn"s coinage of the term "interdynamism", this article sets out to investigate a handful of examples from Ulysses that pinpoint the problematic nature of the various echoes and allusions in it.
Feeling Ulysses: An Address to the Cyclopean Reader
Joyce's Ulysses: Philosophical Perspectives, 2020
This chapter challenges approaches to reading that rely on “scopic dominance.” The chapter proposes an approach to reading that produces an affective reading, one that moves us and that we move, one that we encounter with our living bodies. To read Ulysses “feelingly” is to engage the senses together with the emotions in the act of reading. Such readings cultivate a multi-perspectival proximity to the content, context, and language of the work.
The Eyes Have It: Ocular Imagery and Allusions in James Joyce's Ulysses
2009
Countless themes, motifs and patterns emerge in James Joyce's Ulysses, but the sheer abundance of eyes in the novel (approximately 514 unique appearances) betrays both Joyce's ocular obsession and also his fascination as a modernist writer with perception. Joyce's depiction of eyes both adopts and expands upon the fascination with subjectivity and perception synonymous with modernist literature of the early twentieth century; a tendency, as Leopold Bloom, the novel's protagonist states, to "[s]ee ourselves as others see us" (8.662). A deliberate analysis of eyes in Ulysses reveals their tendency to take on an active role in the narrative, working autonomously to create meaning and demonstrating a characteristically modernist separation between the body and the senses. In this context, active descriptions of eyes in Ulysses help to inform our understanding of these modernist obsessions. In the famous Linati schema Joyce provided to Valery Larbaud, in which he delineated the parallels between Ulysses and the Odyssey, Joyce assigned an organ of the body to each chapter. Thus, examining one of the body's organs can help to understand not only the Homeric elements of Joyce's text, but also the modernist obsession with perception and interiority. An analysis of Joyce's text lends validity to both the Homeric and modernist influences, while also revealing the gendered voyeuristic tendencies of its characters, tendencies characterized by those who have read and criticized the text. Ulysses's radical form of expression comes from its stylistic elements-its narrative perspectives and techniques, its fusion of low and high culture, its subjective emphasis-that help define literary modernism. Several other modernist works (Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust to list a diversity of examples) display an equal fascination with eyes and perception, and these similarities are not coincidental. Critics suggest that modernist works tend to pay particular attention to the eyes of
2021
This study, Freedom, and Desire: A quest for a spiritual journey in the novel by James Joyce, describes the journey of the main character of the story from his adolescence to the best way of conceptualizing the dynamic, multilateral relationship between individual experience and sociocultural scope, since it recognizes the causal significance of culture but also recognizes individual choice and changes. The researcher examines the true desire which enables him to embrace his creative spirits “the actual experiences” which also symbolize freedom. This claim is formed by contemplating how many historical shifts in the socio-cultural context, i.e. the increase in freedom of choice, the shift in interpersonal patterns, the loss of traditional values, the loss of religious understanding, and the increasing conflict between the desire for individuality and the complexity of achieving it, have led to changes in the essence of true intentions and modern personhood. For this research, a qual...
The Agenbite - The James Joyce Webzine , 2017
This paper compares and contrasts James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) with Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse (1927). It examines the way both writers developed a revolutionary and seminal mode for rendering the flux of experience and its impressions on the mind in these two novels. I argue that both Woolf's and Joyce's narrative technique are capable of producing, in sharply distinctive manner, an expansion of the character's (and arguably of the authors') subjective boundaries, particularly as an effect of free indirect speech and of modulations of genre, mode and form. My overarching point is that this destabilization of the subject that occurs in both novels makes the self continuously permeated by, or imbued with otherness. It also saturates it with incessantly transient, fleeting impressions of external worldly, day-to-day events so that the consciousness of the characters blurs into everything that surrounds them. And finally I discuss the way in which both Woolf and Joyce inscribe their ambitious authorial voices inconspicuously in the narrative of both novels.
Intertextual Metempsychosis in Ulysses: Murphy, Sinbad, and the "U.P.: up" Postcard
James Joyce Quarterly, 2007
This article explores the concept of "intertextual metempsychosis" in James Joyce's Ulysses, specifically focusing on the character W. B. Murphy in the "Eumaeus" episode. Ramey examines how Murphy, a seemingly minor character, embodies complex literary and mythological allusions, including parallels to Odysseus and the mythical Sinbad the Sailor. Through Joyce's use of the "mythical method," the article traces how characters in Ulysses represent an ongoing process of textual transmigration, reflecting Joyce's intricate intertextual play between ancient and modern narratives. The analysis reveals Murphy as a disguised figure of Odysseus, drawing on Homeric, Dantean, and even Arabian Nights traditions, thus illustrating the layered and parasitic nature of Joyce's narrative technique. The enigmatic "U.P.: up" postcard in the novel serves as a metafictional clue, linking Murphy to the broader themes of identity, disguise, and literary survival across texts and epochs. -------- Este artículo explora el concepto de "metempsicosis intertextual" en Ulysses de James Joyce, centrándose específicamente en el personaje W. B. Murphy en el episodio "Eumeo". Ramey examina cómo Murphy, un personaje aparentemente menor, encarna complejas alusiones literarias y mitológicas, incluyendo paralelismos con Odiseo y el mítico Simbad el Marino. A través del uso del "método mítico" de Joyce, el artículo traza cómo los personajes de Ulysses representan un proceso continuo de transmigración textual, reflejando el intrincado juego intertextual de Joyce entre narrativas antiguas y modernas. El análisis revela a Murphy como una figura disfrazada de Odiseo, recurriendo a tradiciones homéricas, dantescas e incluso de Las mil y una noches, ilustrando así la naturaleza estratificada y parasitaria de la técnica narrativa de Joyce. La enigmática postal "U.P.: up" en la novela sirve como una pista metaficcional, vinculando a Murphy con los temas más amplios de la identidad, el disfraz y la supervivencia literaria a través de textos y épocas.