Academic literature on the topic '1882-1941 Ulysses Criticism'

This thesis examines James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and early cinema (c. 1895-1920) through Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. Instead of arguing for lines of direct influence between specific films and particular parts of Ulysses, I show that Joyce’s text and selected early films and film genres exhibit parallel philosophies. Ulysses and early cinema share similar ideas on the embodied nature of perception, the close relationship between mind and body, the intermingling of the human and the mechanical, intersubjectivity, and the subject’s inherence in the world. All of these shared ideas are inherently phenomenological. My phenomenological position on the Joyce-and-cinema relationship is at odds with a popular strain of scholarship which cites impersonality, neutrality, and automatism as the key linking factors between early cinema and modernist literature (including Joyce). ‘Joyce-and-cinema’ studies is a relatively large, and growing, field; as is ‘modernism-and-cinema’ studies. As well as ploughing my own path through an already crowded area, I analyse the different trends present (both historically and currently) in each area of study. I also add to the scholarship on phenomenological film theory by analysing the work of phenomenologically inflected film-philosophers and suggesting some new ways in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology might be used in the analysis of films and literature. I provide close analyses of several episodes of Ulysses and pay particular attention to ‘Ithaca’, ‘Circe’, ‘Nausicaa’, and ‘Wandering Rocks’. Several of Charlie Chaplin’s Mutual films are analysed, as are a select number of films by George Méliès. I also look at other trick-films, Irish melodrama, panoramas, ‘phantom rides’, and local actuality films (especially Mitchell and Kenyon’s Living Dublin series). Proto-cinematic devices – the Mutoscope and stereoscope – are also included in my analyses.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2007.
Title from screen (viewed on March 6, 2008). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Ken Davis, Jonathan R. Eller, William F. Touponce. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 214-228).

In his works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), James Joyce demonstrates what he perceives to be the paralyzing effects of those institutionalized religions that sit at the center of cultures. Drawing on Michel Foucault's analysis of institutional dressage as well as his use of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison in Discipline and Punish (1981), this thesis argues that Joyce's portrait of the Catholic Church's influence on Irish culture is his attempt to display its ubiquitous and inextricable power. In both works, Joyce focuses on the internalization of this power which emanates from the physical manifestations of the Church's presence, the strict tenets of its doctrine, and its concept of an omnipotent, omniscient God who, embodied in an individual's conscience, becomes the perfect "surveillant." Tracing the influence of Catholic dressage on his first protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who unequivocally abandons the Catholic faith in A Portrait, Joyce reveals the overwhelming power that the Church held over the cultural consciousness of Ireland, an influence rivaled solely by the British colonial powers. Similarly, in Ulysses, Joyce introduces Leopold Bloom, the Jewish Other, who stands outside the institutional structure of the Church and provides a removed but critical perspective on the Catholic rituals and beliefs which, according to Joyce, were intricately woven into the Irish Weltanschauung. Indeed, while Joyce's critique of the Church's power is clearly evident in the narrative of the novel, in a larger context this criticism is directed at the stifling effects of all institutional powers on individual consciousness. Similarly, Foucault's cultural theories examine the intricacies of such power within a culture and their effect on the individual, who, in short, is a product of these elements. This thesis explores these dynamics in Joyce's works to further understand his position as one of the central novelists of the twentieth century.
Graduation date: 1997