Search Results

This chapter examines a persistent vein of imagery in James Joyce's Ulysses which cross-associates Bloom with stereotypical properties of Jewishness, particularly those of effeminacy and the peculiar slur of male menstruation. Moreover, the panoply of racist stigmas, as the chapter deftly shows, is inherently contradictory because it simultaneously casts Jews as vengeful and bloodthirsty and as timorous and emasculated. Ultimately, Joyce references and counterpoints the lurid denigrations of anti-Semitism and the discourses of masculinism and athleticism espoused by Irish nationalists such as Michael Cusack and Patrick Pearse in order to refute them. This chapter argues that the unmanliness and pacifism of Stephen and especially of Bloom act as a pointed counter to political ideologies that aggrandize violence and aggression.

Eugen Sandow makes a particularly prominent appearance in the “Ithaca” episode where readers are told that his 1897 publication, Strength and How to Obtain It, adorns Leopold Bloom's bookshelf. “Ithaca” is James Joyce's most engaging reflection on contemporary science. Astronomy, eugenics, and experimental psychology are just a few examples of the great number of exact or empirical sciences that inform the content of Ulysses's most inquisitive section. The episode, with its formal reliance on the catechism, also adopts the style of a scientific discourse, presenting a good deal of loose textual material as though it were factual and precise observations of social reality. The episode's probing and questioning manner, demanding precise answers based on information and facts, also evokes a specifically scientific or diagnostic rhetoric — a matter of fact, rational discourse interested, above all, in a clinical and detached observation and representation of Bloom's social reality.

This chapter narrates book's author's first encounter and fascination with Ulysses and a lifelong obsession with this work. Looking at the author's initial encounter with Ulysses, the first draft of his life with Joyce's novel, reveals several possible reasons why he bonded strongly with the novel. Other novels and art works appealed to some of his aesthetic, emotional, and psychological needs, but Ulysses satisfied many more of them, both in his formative years and in later years.

Chapter Two incorporates insights from Anglophone and Spanish criticism on James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) since the twenties as a means to analyze the affinities that Joyce posits between the marginal states of Ireland and Spain, both of which were in upheaval at the moment the novel was published. These narratives in Ulysses, in turn, model the very symbiotic regeneration of Ireland and Spain that Joyce’s first Spanish critics imagined. Ulysses also greatly influenced a contemporaneous generation of writers who, under dictatorship, were searching for non-statist forms through which they might express a new, more cosmopolitan Hispanicity. In the context of Spanish regeneracionismo, their cultural politics also highlight the critical narratives embedded in Joyce’s novel about Ireland and Spain’s shared histories and futures. These include the decline and suffering of both countries at the hands of the British empire, their being seen as Africanized and barbaric by Europeans, and their belonging to Joyce’s sketch of a post-imperial Europe. By integrating Joyce’s cosmopolitanism with Ortega’s, Marichalar, a leading critic now, positions the exilic Joyce as a liberal-humanist Catholic member of new “minor” European avant-garde. These alliances are captured novelistically when Joyce places Leopold and Molly Bloom—the latter was born in Gibraltar to a Spanish mother—alongside one another as prototypes of a renewed European subjectivity.

The dream story in which HCE collapses in the bar and is assisted to bed is interrupted by a sequence of dream episodes ostensibly focused on his son Shaun, the son whom we will see asleep upstairs in the inn, the favored one. Like ALP, generous in her forgiveness and forbearance in the closing pages, HCE has his own style of generosity, and it is on display here. He comes as tolerant and large-hearted, ready to include those who make some sort of effort, dismally unsuccessful though it may be. At this point, his marriage and his love for ALP are central to his conception of what his life is and means. Like Leopold Bloom, however, HCE is an outsider—not only in his own account of the wooing of ALP but also in those given elsewhere in the Wake.

This chapter juxtaposes the encounter between Odysseus and Nausicaa in the Odyssey with that between Leopald Bloom and Gerty Macdowell in Ulysses. It emphasizes the sexual and linguistic ambiguities of both texts and contrasts them with sanitized readings of the Odyssey, such as a Victorian poem by Mortimer Collins, published in 1869, where Odysseus and Nausicaa are presented as simple paradigms of wisdom and chastity. Situating Joyce's Homer in relation to Victorian scholarship on Homer, this chapter argues that Joyce exposed the moral blind-spots in prior receptions of the Odyssey and identifies this novel as an important pivot for the rehabilitation of Odysseus' subtle character in 20th-century receptions.