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Ulysses by james joyce5/19/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() As a notable experiment in the rendering of time, Ulysses displays a modernist skepticism about the linear or sequential arrangement of events into traditional plots. As an exploration of consciousness or the inner life, it inspired Woolf’s injunction that the novelist should “consider the ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” For Joyce this entails a preference for an anti-hero, or at any rate a hero who does not resemble the heroes of earlier novels, as well as an exploration of subject matter that, while a part of ordinary consciousness, is often taboo in art, such as defecation and masturbation. Ulysses demonstrates most of the notable characteristics of the modern novel. During the course of writing Ulysses, however, he largely abandoned this method and replaced it with a vast array of styles, so that the reader’s attention is directed as much to Joyce’s use of a variety of literary techniques as to the events he describes. Joyce began the novel in a stream-of-consciousness or “interior monologue” technique that developed naturally out of his experiments in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ( 1916). Joyce’s novel describes a day in the life of an advertising canvasser in pre-war Dublin, drawing implicit parallels between his adventures and those described in Homer’s Odyssey. “It is a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape,” wrote T. ![]()
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