The Printed Word in Joyce's Ulysses: A Visual Path to Interpretation (original) (raw)
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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.
The Labyrinth of Understanding: Textual Space in James Joyce's Ulysses
2011
James Joyce's Ulysses is a labyrinth of understanding. Its textual space creates an area of understanding the diverse cross-connecting routes of which the reader has to explore so that the correlations of meaning and hence, the possibilities of making sense of these correlations may unfold. Differently put, Ulysses, as a textual construction, insists that its intersections, echoes and associations be comprehended throughout the spatial exploration of the text so that in this way it may reveal itself as a dynamic, ever-changing field of meaning, open to interpretation. The present paper wishes to elaborate briefly how this textually created field of meaning -that is the textual space of Ulysses -reveals itself throughout the process of understanding. Such an elaboration requires that the particular mode of textual space Ulysses creates -and thereby exposes -be elucidated beforehand.
APPLYING TEXT LINGUISTICS TO THE READING OF ULYSSES
James Joyce’s Ulysses is often considered one of the most remarkable novels of the twentieth century. Reading Ulysses, however, could easily become a traumatic experience both for teachers and students of literature, due to the erudition it demands from the reader as well as to the author’s radical experimentation with linguistic resources. In this work we propose the analysis of two excerpts from Ulysses from the point of view of text linguistics, as a way of lessening the initial estrangement a student might feel in approaching the novel for the first time. The process, as suggested by Ingedore Koch and Vanda Elias, involves the activation of three types of knowledge: real-world knowledge, interactional knowledge and linguistic knowledge. Firstly, in a top-down approach to reading, we look at background information regarding the environment in which the text was composed and the conditions of its production. Next, we examine the concept and techniques of the so-called “stream of consciousness” literature to, at last, perceive the recurrence of certain linguistic traits, e.g., the author’s careful avoidance of some traditional linguistic resources – such as connectors, capitalization or punctuation – in favor of other strategies (mainly substitution, ellipsis and lexical selection) in his attempt to materialize the stream of human thought on the page. With this it becomes possible – going from context to text, and paying special attention to text linguistics – to encourage the reader’s interaction with complex works such as Ulysses and to make the task of reading Joyce much more pleasant and rewarding.
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
Global Language Review
This study unveils some strategies deployed by James Joyce to manipulate the reader when they experience textual patterns to decipher meaning from the text. Investigating Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this study delves into how the reader is pragmatically positioned and cognitively (mis)directed as Joyce guides their attention and influences their judgment. Thus, the text is a tool in the hand of the reader which evokes certain responses in readers and makes them invest time and struggle in understanding the text. Joyces use of speech categories and their speech acts or their summaries are crucial determining factors for the scales and corresponding modes of discourse presentation (Semino and Short 2004,p.19). The study concludes by providing the significant and functional role of the interplay between two highly complex discourse phenomena: speech acts and discourse presentation.
Configuring Cognitive Architecture: Mind-Reading and Metarepresentations in James Joyce’s Ulysses
[A]theists […] go howling for the priest and they dying and why […] because they’re afraid of hell […] I know. So says Molly Bloom in her eight sentence soliloquy in the closing chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses and in doing so engages our evolved cognitive facility to monitor sources of representation (to keep track of who knows that the terror of hell is known in the mind of another), that is, to metarepresent them. The ability to imagine the thoughts spiral through the mind of another is known to cognitive psychologists as ‘mind-reading’ or ‘Theory of Mind’. This enables us to endow literary characters with a range of emotions, thoughts, desires and, due to our metarepresentational ability, assign each degrees of validity according to the source of the representation (i.e the characters and the narrator). Keeping up with levels of intentionality, to give it its critical gloss, in order to rake a text for clues as to the mental states of its characters becomes more problematic for the reader who has to contend with the complexities of a text such as Ulysses. But as Lisa Zunshine has noted, we are able to attribute mental states to fictional characters because our ability to do so is ‘crucially mediated by the workings of our metarepresentational ability’. This paper will discuss the dizzying multi-representations of Joyce’s fictional phallogocentric world of turn-of-the-century Dublin as mediated through the thoughts of his ruminative androgyne Leopold Bloom who the author sets in perfect textual relief to the more literary Stephen Dedalus. Unlike Stephen, who increasingly shuns the beery bravado of the masculine world and retreats into a wandering silence, Bloom displays a rare capacity to ‘see’ Dublin’s socio-cultural ideologies through the eyes and minds of its atomized population. He has, in effect, the ability to markedly influence the reader’s interpretation of each character that weaves its faltering way through Joyce’s vertiginous textual tapestry. I hope to demonstrate that, even though Bloom ‘exists’ only as black marks on a white page, an entity composed entirely of syntax, our evolved mammalian brains are able to emotionally invest in, as well as assign a weighty degree of ‘truth-value’ to the introspective contemplations of the author’s ink-and-paper mind-reader, Leopold Bloom.
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
Analysing lexico-semantic features in James Joyce's Ulysses
2022
Stylistics' primary interest is to examine literary texts from a linguistic angle. It highlights the formal characteristics in a text using certain systematic models. The present paper fell into the Modern English Literature. It threw light on the lexico-semantic features in James Joyce's novel, Ulysses. This inquiry aimed to identify the main lexico-semantic features and to interpret Joyce's motives behind using them. The two researchers used Leech and Short's model of analysis. Careful reading of the novel revealed Joyce's varied applications of general lexicon such as colloquialism, nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs that construct unique meanings in the text and evoke novel's themes. Analyzing the semantic level showed Joyce's employment of tropes such as metaphor, metonymy and irony along with neologism.