User:Rsl12/UlyssesSignificance

Literary Significance of Ulysses

In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.[ref 5]

Ulysses has been called "the most prominent landmark in modernist literature", a work where life's complexities are depicted with "unprecedented, and unequalled, linguistic and stylistic virtuosity". <The New York Times guide to essential knowledge> Whether or not Ulysses is a complete success is a matter for debate. Virginia Woolf noted that "Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe--immense in daring, terrific in disaster."<The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, Sampson G, Churchill RC>

Joyce's influence can be seen in the works of authors such as William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison.

A year- by-year search of references to the seminal modernist novel in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index indicates a gradual dwindling of academic interest since the late 1970s. The more general Nexis database tells a similar story: While the book is still referenced several hundred times a year, most of these are placeholder allusions that cite "Ulysses" as an example of a difficult classic, the kind of book only a college professor could love. <http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-06-13/opinion/17431599_1_james-joyce-s-ulysses-great-books-john-donne>

Stream of Consciousness

Ulysses has been called the finest example of the use of stream-of-consciousness in modern fiction, going deeper and farther than any other novelist in handling interior monologue.<history of english literature, N Jayapalan. Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2001> The technique employed by Joyce has been praised for its faithful representation of the flow of thought, feeling, mental reflection, and shifts of mood.<short history of english literature, harry blamires> This style has allowed for "brilliant insights into the workings of the human mind" to be revealed. <routledge> The critic Edmund Wilson noted that Ulysses attempts to render "as precisely and as directly as it is possible in words to do, what our participation in life is like--or rather, what it seems to us like as from moment to moment we live." <Paul Grey, "The Writer James Joyce". time magazine>

Unity

Joyce throws up metaphors, symbols, ambiguities, and overtones which gradually link themselves together so as to form a network of connections binding the whole work. <Blamires>

System of Correspondences

This system of connections gives the novel a wide, more universal significance, as "Leopold Bloom becomes a modern Ulysses, an Everyman in a Dublin which becomes a microcosm of the world." <Routledge history of literature in English>

Eliot described this system as the "mythic method": "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." <tim armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History>

Its style is marked with rare ingenuity, witticism, and satirical flashes.

Use of language

The staccato, fragmented language of Bloom's thought, contrasts with the punctuationless, flowing style of Molly's. <Routledge>

Ulysses contains "almost every imaginable form of narrative." <Christopher Gillie, Movements in English literature, 1900-1940>

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