Browsing by Subject "Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Beyond Impulse: The Pleasurable Death of Certainty in Ulysses
    (2010) Amendolara, Ben; Mohan, Rajeswari
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    “Ireland sober is Ireland free”: the confluence of nationalism and alcohol in the traumatic, repetitive, and ritualistic response to the famine in James Joyce’s Ulysses
    (2005) Baillie, Brian; Sherman, Debora
    Joyce deftly weaves the fabric of Irish life in Ulysses. One can easily picture his characters walking down the most obscure of streets and encountering the most immediate of acquaintances. The lyrical nature of Irish conversation provides the linguistic backdrop for the various challenges of language that Joyce embarks upon throughout the novel. From remembering the dead to requesting a pint amongst friends, a mimetic portrait of Dublin is created through the text. Perhaps the most stereotypical of activities in the Irish social fabric is drinking, which both produces and reproduces a nationalist rhetoric. The scene of a dark pub filled with men scorned by the English inevitably becomes filled with political rhetoric and rebel cries. The confluence of drinking and nationalist fervor occurs in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses; those imbricated discourses enact a stranglehold on the Irish populace. This drinking is social and not necessarily abusive, a fact noted in Joyce’s breezy language in the “Hades” episode, “Expect we’ll pull up here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation. Elixir of life.” This particular description embodies many of the elements within this stereotype. In that carriage, the Irish men view alcohol as the natural outlet for mourning and death; Bloom, however, stands far outside the society where, in the original Irish, usquebeagh is in fact the “waters of life”, or “elixir of life”. That space of death and misery in the larger historical context is, arguably, the source of a drinking culture.
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    “Poor girl!” : Feminism, Disability and the Other in Ulysses
    (2006) Flaherty, Patricia; Sherman, Debora
    The purpose of this study is to examine Gerty MacDowell in Nausicaa, Chapter 13 of James Joyces Ulysses, and how her overwhelming femininity affects her disability, and how that conflation of femininity and disability largely engages feminist disability theory. Gerty MacDowell prides herself on the active sexualizing of her own body. In the interaction between Bloom and Gerty, disability is recognized textually as her link to humanity. In recognizing Gerty's disability, Bloom is able to recognize as well as reflect on his own disabilities albeit figurative but still very integral in the way he views himself. By recognizing that disabilities are part of all human lives, Ulysses promotes a theory of disability studies that is extremely positive and helps to break down the stigmatizing of the disabled. Gerty's disability also helps further an argument relating not to disability, but rather to human imperfection. We come into contact with many transgressions on the part of the characters, and Gerty's disability reminds the narrative that disabilities/mistakes/transgressions are part of what it is to be human. This recognition helps ideas regarding disabilities in a way that promotes a more realistic idea about the body and makes the unrealistic and damaging ideal body untenable.
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    Selections from James Joyce's "Ulysses"
    (1991) Miller, Jacqueline; Wright, Kathleen, 1944-; Macbeth, Danielle
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    "Signs on a white field": James Joyce, Ulysses, and the postcolonial sublime
    (2004) Fischette, Michael; Devenney, Christopher, 1961-
    The purpose of this study is to examine the ways in which James Joyce's Ulysses is imbued with a kind of Postcolonial sublime. In doing so my hope is to prove that Joyce's text is, in a way, a performance: through his wide-ranging use of distinct figures, tropes, and motifs, Joyce acts out and reconciles himself with the trauma of colonization. Most importantly, however, in Ulysses Joyce attempts to articulate the ontological status of a group--the colonized--that has heretofore gone radically unarticulated. "Nothing can describe well enough the extraordinary deficiency of the colonized," Albert Memmi writes, pointing to the colonial subject's under-representation; but in Ulysses, Joyce without question succeeds in figuring this "deficiency" by upending traditional notions of "text," "identity," and "language." In the end, Joyce subverts the very medium in which he writes: he appropriates the tongue of the colonizer in order to re-establish himself in the aftermath of colonization.
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    “Still, it was a kind of language between us”: Desire, Identity and Ethics in ‘Nausicaa’
    (2013) Cohen-Carroll, Natasha; Sherman, Debora
    This thesis examines the ways in which desire is constructed in the Nausicaa chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, paying specific attention to how the characters’ past trauma or vulnerabilities inform these desires. Through their exchange, Gerty is able to control Bloom’s lust and be desired free from the shadow of her physical disability, while Bloom is offered the chance to reaffirm his manhood, an especially delicate matter due to the end of his sexual life with Molly. The experience in a sense mends these traumas, as it places them both sexual beings in the world, engaged in a reciprocal exchange. The episode testifies to a form of mutuality and communication, and, above all, to the acknowledgement that there was a “kind of language between us.” The encounter is furthermore characterized by Gerty’s attention to Bloom and by the fulfilling nature of their exchange, and can be seen as a moment of responsibility towards the other. While the exchange is undoubtedly imperfect, we might consider viewing it in terms of Levinas’s conception of alterity and responsibility. Using Levinas’s works, the thesis examines the ethical nature of their exchange: Bloom’s and Gerty’s alterity is preserved throughout, and is in fact the basis for their self-actualization. Through being recognized and acknowledged by the “Other”, both Bloom and Gerty leave their encounter with a more fluid and nuanced vision of their own identities. Indeed, Bloom and Gerty take an active role in shaping their identities and formulating their desires. Beyond the expression of their sexual desire, their encounter provides an open space of self-realization and mutual understanding, in which they can work through these traumas, and suture tears in their identities.
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    'Ulysses': Activating Nietzsche
    (2012) Schoch, Timothy E.; Mohan, Rajeswari
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