Class of October 18th, 2004

Class of October 18th, 2004
LBCL490

Joyce, Ulysses, Class IV

---- Term paper is due December 8. 10 to 12 pages. Subjects is one of this semester text or film. Not a comparative. ----

Jess's presentation
- Modernist book
mystery of the counciousness: "what do we know about that"
- the "hall of mirrors thing"
reality is made of individuals subjectivities
The fact there's not only "one" narrative figure represent this
- "ring" of manifold influences
Dedalus: Ireland + catholocism + memories
- Suggestions, unfinished sentences, planting ideas subjectively
"problem of the frame": words + language
Addressing the exploded frame of traditional storytelling
Chivaleresque embedded in the mondane
jokes'o'serious thing
- things we mock are very serious stuff
- joking about ourselves, about the artist, etc...

Holding out to the present
- through the present all the futures becomes the past
- as an english writer: Shakespear is the shadow
- reviving a national tradition, Irish, in the english language
- chapter about ghost: Hamlet, Shakespear being the ghost.
A text textile
woven unwoven
manufactured
flux
- Stephen obsessed with fathers
Bloom is a metaphoric fathers
Stephen wants to be his own father: the artist creating itself
- laws and rules declares "evidences" of fatherhood
- but what physical proofs? (vs motherhood)
Fatherhood is the mystery: abstract and fictive
Emphasis is on mother (vs father) = shift toward speculative skepticism

"holyghost"
Mother - substance - "real figure" we can't escape

Haunting vision of the past: stuck in a moment

In last class: we have seen that for Bloom, "real life is love"
"the word everyone knows: love"
Beach scene: Gertrude and Bloom, central theme is love
This theme recurrent, over and over again: the main problem of them all

The chapter of the beach is juxtaposed to one on mothers and mary
why?
"Onanistic activity"
- material, litteral, pragmatic
a representation w/o guilt of masturbation
desexualized makes it sexualized erotically, like the changed depictions of Christ & Mary
"unintentional sexuality"... or at least uncouncious
Gertrude...

jurisprudence of "litterature and sex" : "is not erotic what doesn't arouse you"
Ulysses: dirt for dirtsake

"I am a..." - act of self definition not completed
- undefined

Molly and ending:
- Filters everything through the "now"
Molly as an ending to Ulysses:
- no punctuation, hyper-rational but becomes nonsensical: falling asleep, fairytalesque

"autobiographical reading": Mother is a shrewd, unthrustworthy thing.