James Joyce: Ulysses

Vincent Sherry addresses two apparently separate preoccupations in Ulysses – its reliance on ancient epic, and its highly experimental verbal art – and develops new, unifying critical arguments through a detailed, sequenced reading of the text. Joyce’s appropriation of Homer is aligned with other contemporary reconstructions of the Odyssey, in particular Samuel Butler’s and Georg Lukacs’, and this historically enriched view opens up a new axis of value in Ulysses: a shift from the interior sphere of the modern novel to the social wholeness of classical epic. Related issues in language philosophy point up a difference between concrete specifics and generic verbal abstractions, a problem Joyce understands as the tension between radical individuality and the generalising, socialising force of words.