“A very short space of time through very short times of space” (U3.11): Reading the City in James Joyce’s Ulysses

LaRosa, Katherine “A very short space of time through very short times of space” (U3.11): Reading the City in James Joyce’s Ulysses. 2012. Radford University, Thesis. Radford University Scholars' Repository.

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Abstract

In his famous novel, Ulysses, James Joyce utilizes the cityscape of Dublin, Ireland, as a physical and conceptual tool for constructing the narrative and linguistic structures of his text. The novelty of this thesis is that it explores how the cityscape of Dublin and its urban elements influence and control the text’s characters, narrative structures, and linguistic structures. Critical studies on Joyce’s use of Dublin’s cityscape in Ulysses represent a new and emerging type of scholarship which this thesis joins, as it investigates the physical manifestations of the cultural ideology present in Dublin, as well as the subversions of these cultural ideologies that are enabled in the text when narrative events are set away from the actual city streets and public spaces. By applying urban, semiotic, and poststructuralist theory to Ulysses, including the works of Kevin Lynch, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Julia Kristeva, this study argues that the city of Dublin is a prominent figure, a character, in the novel. It also investigates the concepts of city space through the individual perceptions of the characters as they enable subversion of political, religious, narrative, and bodily proscriptions. Chapter 1 explores how the cityscape of Dublin influences the progression of the novel as well as the format of the text as mediated through Leopold Bloom. It further considers how space in the city allows for linguistic and narrative free play. Chapter 2 explores the functioning of the city as a material ideology that limits the characters’ ability to express political, religious, and bodily subversions. Chapter 3 applies Foucault’s theory of heterotopic spaces to investigate instances of open subversion – narrative, political, and bodily – when characters are physically outside of the public city spaces and away from the controls of the material ideology of the cityscape. Katherine A. LaRosa, M.A. Department of English, 2012 Radford University

Item Type:	Thesis
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions:	Radford University > College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences > Department of English
Date Deposited:	29 May 2013 14:10
Last Modified:	20 Apr 2023 18:18
URI:	http://wagner.radford.edu/id/eprint/69

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