ulysses presentaion

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How the ‘foot and mouth leitmotif invokes the national question in Ulysses. Or why Ulysses IS a nationalist text.

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Page 1: Ulysses presentaion

How the ‘foot and mouth leitmotif invokes the

national question in Ulysses. Or why Ulysses IS a

nationalist text.

Page 2: Ulysses presentaion

Presentation Outline:

1. The art of the quotidian: the break between Joyce and Yeats.

2. Joyce Nationalist or traitor?3. Foot and mouth: literary leitmotif & historical

reality.4. Foot and mouth: it’s the key, it’s the secret.5. Theoretical précis.6. Close reading and critical analysis.7. Conclusions.8. Q&A.

Page 3: Ulysses presentaion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCCw2afIM08

The art of the quotidian: The break between Joyce and Yeats.

• Quotidian: Adjective1. Of or occurring every day; daily.2. Ordinary or everyday, esp. when mundane.Synonyms: daily - everyday - diurnal - ordinary – commonplace• Yeats: Often simple, plain, direct language yet

held back by Victorian mores and conventions. Highbrow

• Joyce: One step beyond assimilated the avante garde work by revelling in the base and everyday: sex, food, socialism, nationalism and micro socio-political exchanges. Aesthetically highbrow but lowbrow concerns.

Page 4: Ulysses presentaion

Joyce nationalist or traitor?

NationalistEmer NolanSeamus HeaneyRichard Ellman

TraitorDavid Lloyd

Page 5: Ulysses presentaion

Foot and mouth: literary Leitmoif & historical reality.

Foot and mouth in 1920s

Economic Development in Ireland By C.H. Oldham, Esq., Hon Secretary. Barrington Lecturer on Political Economy, &c. Read Wednesday,14thMarch,1900. http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/2262/7854/1/jssisiVolX548_567.pdfThe Irish Experience of Economic Lift Off Paul Sweeney http://www.ictu.ie/download/pdf/celtic_tiger.pdf

• Foot and mouth mentioned 10 times and inverted as foot in mouth once in a novel of 265,000 words. Significant?

• Dairy farming significant part of Irish economy both at Ulysses time of writing and today now the building bubble has burst.

• Foot and mouth as metaphor for the diseased Irish agrarian economy which was in recovery from the Potato famines AND under threat from foot and mouth.

Page 6: Ulysses presentaion

Foot and mouth: it’s the key, it’s the secret.

Michael Billig: ‘Crises do not, create nation-states as nation states …[instead , nations and the] whole complex of beliefs, assumptions, habits, representations and practises are produced in a banally mundane way’

Page 7: Ulysses presentaion

Theoretical précis.

• Duffy: Ulysses is ‘the starred text of an Irish literature…the book of postcolonial independence…a guerrilla text [that has] all the time been covertly operating as a postcolonial novel’.

• David Lloyd: The ‘anti-representational tendency in Ulysses …[and] the [opposite] hybrid quality of popular forms exceed the monologic desire of cultural nationalism’.

Page 8: Ulysses presentaion

Close reading and critical analysis.

• Mr Deasy: ‘It’s about the foot and mouth disease…There can be no two opinions on the matter…They [Jews] sinned against the light’ (pp32-34).

Page 9: Ulysses presentaion

Close reading and critical analysis.

• ‘The Bullockbefriending Bard’ (p127)

• ‘Foot and mouth disease!...Great nationalist meeting in Borris-in Ossory. All balls! Bulldosing the public! Give them something to bite on’ (p130).

Page 10: Ulysses presentaion

Close reading and critical analysis.

• ‘foot and mouth disease. I want to give the Citizen the hard word about it’ (p281).

• ‘Starts telling the Citizen about the foot and mouth disease… and the Citizen sending them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his sheepdip for the scab… L. Bloom, who met with a mixed reception of applause and hisses,… brought the discussion to a close’ (pp301-304)

Page 11: Ulysses presentaion

Conclusions.

• Ulysses an experiment in nationalist literature presupposed in a ‘concrete’ Irishness.

• Dialogical position left him open to criticism from both sides.

• ‘Joyce did not leave Ireland behind him in any way except physically. (Richard Ellman 1977:7)

Page 12: Ulysses presentaion

Q&A.

1.Is Leopold Bloom or Stephen ‘hero’ Dedalus the hero of the novel?

2.Is Ulysses a success as a literary experiment or a glorious failure?

3.Is Ulysses a nationalist, anti nationalist text or an equivocatingly dialogic text?