A man and a woman meet in Lisbon and fall in love. City of Ulysses is their story, and the city's love story besides. It is a story that leads readers down multiple paths, through myth and history, reality and fantasy, literature and the visual arts, the past and the present, male and female relations, the crisis of civilisation and the need to reimagine the world.
This book presents a multi-pronged inverse historical analysis of Joyce’s high-modernist magnum opus Ulysses, foregrounding the historicity of its unapologetic subject matter – the quotidian. It argues that the everyday life depicted in Ulysses espouses alternative historical trajectories neglected by traditional historiographic paradigms, which largely deal with great personages and momentous events. The sphere of ordinary life is also where lasting changes must be accomplished if transformations are to happen at all in what gets written or accepted as a posteriori ‘history.’ Across eight elaborate chapters, the book reconstructs quotidian ‘micro-histories’ surrounding work and income, material objects and practices, everyday relationships, body and health, ideologies and power, socio-psychological resources, and, in one of the many internal heterogenizations of the everyday, gender issues.
Though James Joyce was steeped in philosophy and humanism, he has received too little attention from contemporary philosophers in comparison to many of the other titans of modernist fiction. This book probes the possibilities for thinking philosophically about Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, presenting readings by renowned scholars such David Hills, Garry L. Hagberg, Vicki Mahaffey, Martha C. Nussbaum, Sam Slote, Wendy J. Truran, and Philip Kitcher, who also provides an introduction to the volume that considers broader themes and situates Ulysses as a work of philosophical interest. For the central characters of Ulysses--Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, "How to live?" is an urgent question. Each must either start anew, or attempt to recover lost paths. Chapters plumb the depths of the philosophical quandaries that present themselves to these characters--reflections on death and overcoming disgust, Leopold Bloom's evocations of conscious thought, the dominance of vision in our thinking about the senses, identity, and the possibility of revising one's values are only a handful of the subjects covered in the volume. Ulysses is an intrinsically and deeply philosophical work, and these readings provide new inroads and firm orientation for Joyce's project. Readers will come away with renewed appreciation for one of our greatest works of literature in the English language, and deepened understanding of Joyce's attempt to offer alternative ways of structuring and enriching the world of our experience.
Ulysses takes place in a single day 16 June 1904 also known as Bloomsday it sets the characters and incidents of the Odyssey of Homer in modern Dublin and represents Odysseus (Ulysses) Penelope and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus and contrasts them with their lofty models. The book explores various areas of Dublin life dwelling on its squalor and monotony. Nevertheless the book is also an affectionately detailed study of the city. In Ulysses Joyce employs stream of consciousness parody jokes and virtually every other literary technique to present his characters. Many consider it the best novel of the twentieth century. It is powerfully written a book for the ages.
James Joyce's Ulysses is considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. This new edition - published to celebrate the book's first publication - helps readers to understand the pleasures of this monumental work and to grapple with its challenges. Copiously equipped with maps, photographs, and explanatory footnotes, it provides a vivid and illuminating context for the experiences of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom, as well as Joyce's many other Dublin characters, on June 16, 1904. Featuring a facsimile of the historic 1922 Shakespeare and Company text, this version also includes Joyce's own errata as well as references to amendments made in later editions. Each of the eighteen chapters of Ulysses is introduced by a leading Joyce scholar. These richly informative pieces discuss the novel's plot and allusions, while also explaining crucial questions that have puzzled and tantalized readers over the last hundred years.
