Ulysses (by James Joyce)

In Jean Kimball's Jungian reading of Ulysses, Joyce's artist-hero Stephen Dedalus confronts in Leopold Bloom a hitherto unconscious aspect of his personality. The result of this confrontation, Kimball argues as a central tenet in her unique reading of Ulysses, is the gradual development of a relationship between the two protagonists that parallels C. G. Jung's descriptions of the encounter between the Ego and the Shadow in that stage of his theoretical individuation process called "the realization of the shadow". These parallels form a unifying strand of meaning that runs throughout this multidimensional novel and is supported by the text and contexts of Ulysses. Kimball has provided here the first comprehensive study of the relationship between Jungian psychology and Joyce's Ulysses. Bucking critical trends, she focuses on Stephen rather than Bloom. She also notes certain parallels - synchronicity - in the lives of both Jung and Joyce, not because the men influenced one another but because they speculated about personality at the same historical time. Finally, noting that both Jung and Joyce came from strong Christian backgrounds, she asserts that the doubleness of the human personality fundamental to Christian theology is carried over into Jung's psychology and Joyce's fiction.

For James Joyce, perhaps the most crucial of all human faculties was memory. It represented both the central thread of identity & a looking glass into the past. It served as an avenue into other minds, an essential part of the process of literary composition & narration, & the connective tissue of cultural tradition. In Joyce's Book of Memory John S. Rickard demonstrates how Joyce's body of work-Ulysses in particular-operates as a "mnemotechnic," a technique for preserving & remembering personal, social, & cultural pasts. Offering a detailed reading of Joyce & his methods of writing, Rickard investigates the uses of memory in Ulysses & analyzes its role in the formation of personal identity. The importance of forgetting & repression, as well as the deadliness of nostalgia & habit in Joyce's paralyzed Dublin are also revealed. Noting the power of spontaneous, involuntary recollection, Rickard locates Joyce's mnemotechnic within its historical & philosophical contexts. As he examines how Joyce responded to competing intellectual paradigms, Rickard explores Ulysses' connection to medieval, modern, & (what would become) postmodern world-views, as well as its display of tensions between notions of subjective & universal memory. Finally, Joyce's Book of Memory illustrates how Joyce distilled subjectivity, history, & cultural identity into a text that offers a panoramic view of the modern period. This book will interest students & scholars of Joyce, as well as those engaged in the study of modern & postmodern literature.

James Joyce has emerged as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century, and his writings continue to invite enormous amounts of scholarly attention. This volume offers a careful reading of Joyce within the context of recent developments in postcolonial theory. Booker shows that Joyce's work provides critiques of capitalism and colonialism that have much in common with the works of more recent African and Caribbean writers. However, Joyce remains a fundamentally European writer whose work differs substantially from that of most postcolonial writers from Africa and the Caribbean. In pursuing these readings, Booker also pays careful attention to the cultural politics of Joyce criticism, arguing that ideological considerations arising primarily from the Cold War have, until now, strongly distorted readings of Joyce from all political perspectives.