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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.29770 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Butts, Gerald Michael. |
| Contributors | Ronsley, Joseph (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001761907, proquestno: MQ55119, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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