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When I first encountered James Joyce's Ulysses, at the age of sixteen, I was predictably unprepared for the book. Its shifts in narrative voice, extensive use of stream of consciousness, and ostensible disorder make the book a daunting task for the first time reader. Fortunately, my age allowed me to consign my lack of understanding to naivete, rather than, as did many early critics, to authorial deficiencies. In addition to my ignorance regarding Ulysses itself, I was completely unaware of the extensive critical debates surrounding its myriad aspects, from the supposed "communion" between Stephen and Bloom in "Ithaca" to the fact that the very edition I was reading (the Gabler text) was the source of considerable controversy in the Joycean community. / Having experienced frustrations common to many readers of the book, I can understand why so many readers "give up" on Ulysses. Obviously, I was drawn back to the book, but by neither its encyclopaedic nature, nor the various games it plays with literary traditions, nor any other "technical" aspect of the author's virtuosity; I was, of course, ignorant to these features. Rather, I found---and continue to find---Ulysses an extremely compelling work of art because of the manner in which it seems to be energized with "warm fullblooded life," in the words of Bloom. The impressive extent to which Joyce has successfully created ostensibly real human beings is both remarkable and often remarked upon. Less well documented are the underlying philosophical assumptions which inform Joyce's meticulous method of characterization. The present study of Ulysses aims to uncover these assumptions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the prose style of James Joyce's Ulysses provides seductive gaps which by design prompt readers to become co-producers of the text. Joyce strategically creates opportunities for readers to engage actively with the text through response-inviting gaps in the prose. The various types of gaps in the text place demands on readers and, inevitably, upon the author. The more reader-friendly gaps are overdetermined gaps which, by definition, are obvious and point to their own completion. These gaps when filled are, more often than not, confirmed by related references throughout the text. Ulysses, however, also abounds with gaps of indeterminacy. The ambiguous nature of these gaps generates anxiety for readers by undermining the expectations established by overdetermined gaps. Joyce's prose arrangements continually call on readers to play roles and adapt these roles to the linguistic movements of the text. This project endeavours to analyse how different gaps function and the degree to which they work in conjunction to seduce readers and the author into the dual roles of co-production and co-consumption of Ulysses.

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This study examines Ulysses as a response to the Irish Literary Revival's expectation that a native epic would crown Ireland's literary achievements and to the country's imminent independence under the Sinn Fein. / Ulysses thematizes the compositional imperatives which Virgil's Aeneid made canonical for the national epic. This perspective reconfigures the legacy of Stephen Dedalus' heroic stance in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Arthur Griffith's arguments in The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland (1904) through which Sinn Fein won national prominence. / Through Stephen's encounter with Leopold Bloom, Ulysses substitutes its own account of the origin and future of the modern Irish polity. The "Telemachiad" redefines Stephen the epic poet as an epic character. Bloom's family history, including the characterization of Milly, supplants Griffith's founding myth with a more comprehensive historical vision. Through this concern with the genre and history, Ulysses reconstitutes the national epic's traditional discursive domain.

Following and at times reworking the relation between language, society and selfhood in the antifoundationalist philosophies of Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty, the thesis develops the idea of the novel as a kind of conversation. The thesis takes James Joyce's Ulysses as a progression of thought and style in which its three principal characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom, expound their views and then lapse into silence as part of an ongoing conversation. Three episodic conversations in particular are discussed: for Stephen, Scylla and Charybdis; for Bloom, Cyclops; and for Molly, Penelope. These conversations, it is suggested, parallel Joyce's evolving novelistic theories, and mark a movement from a metaphysical, to a scientized, and eventually to an ironist understanding of selfhood and society.

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