Scarica James Joyce's Ulysses: Summary e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce's Ulysses: Summary With the publication of his landmark novel,Ulysses, in 1922, James Joyce became a literary celebrity known for his groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness technique and sexually explicit content. Many critics praise the work as one of the finest novels ever written. Until Joyce won landmark court cases in 1934 in the US and 1936 in England, Ulysses was banned for being pornographic. Ulysses features three main characters: Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus. Middle-aged Leopold Bloom works as an advertising salesman and is Jewish. He is married to Molly Bloom. Stephen Dedalus is a teacher and aspiring writer, who was also the main character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce creates a series of parallels between Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey, so the novel is one of the greatest examples of the reworking of the myth in modernist literature. Ulysses is the Latin version of the name Odysseus, who is the hero of Homer’s epic poem. There are similarities between the experiences of the characters: Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, Penelope and Molly Bloom, and Telemachus and Stephen Dedalus. The epic method The wanderings and tribulations of the epic hero, his adventures through different realms and seas and his final return home to his wife are used in Ulysses as a parallel to the events in the life of common men and women in modern Dublin. Joyce, however, uses the epic model to stress the lack of heroism, of ideals, of love and trust in the modern world. In short, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom as he goes from place to place in Dublin over the course of one day: June 16, 1904, from 8 a.m. until 3 a.m. Joyce chose that particular day because it was the day of his first date with his wife, Nora Barnacle. The date has become known as Bloomsday, an annual celebration of James Joyce, and is observed in Dublin and around the world. Ulysses is quite long: it is approximately 265,000 words in length, divided into three parts: The Telemachiad, the Odyssey, and The Nostos. The novel is also divided into eighteen episodes. Even the episode titles are long and difficult to decipher. Each episode’s title comes from a character or incident in Homer’s Odyssey and is also is labelled with the time it took place and location. In addition, the stream-of- consciousness technique makes Ulysses a difficult read. This prose style ignores syntactical and grammatical connectives and juxtaposes disparate and apparently incongruous images, in an attempt to show the chaotic flow of thoughts in the human mind. The novel is also full of puns, parodies, and allusions.
