Finding Joy in Joyce: A Readers Guide to Ulysses

Front Cover
Universal-Publishers, 2000 - 615 pages

This is a detailed reader's guide to James Joyce's masterwork Ulysses, voted the most important novel of the 20th century. The guide provides episode by episode an in depth explanation of the action and symbolism, including a description of the related books of Homer's Odyssey and the correspondences. This guide is designed to give the user the keys to the kingdom of one of the wonders of Western civilization.

The non-academic author, a retired lawyer and life long Joyce reader, brings new approaches to find the deep meaning of each of Joyce's episodes and the novel as a whole. The scope of this effort, the complete Joyce, is unique in an area monopolized by more narrowly focused academics.

The analysis elucidates Joyce's technique to mimic patterns in history and nature in his architecture of coherence. His medicine for the diseased spirit of our age is a custom blend of Jesus and Buddha, not as they are marketed by institutional religions, but as they lived their lives as humans. Joyce's god is more possibilities in life and art, and this guide will do that for you.

 

Contents

Introduction
5
Summary of Part I
20
Telemachus
26
Nestor
85
Proteus
110
Summary of Part II
153
Calypso
155
Lotuseaters
184
Cyclops
372
Nausicaa
396
Oxen
421
Circe
465
Summary of Part III
515
Eumaeus
517
Ithaca
538
Penelope
586

Hades
206
Aeolus
230
Lestrygonian
256
Scylla Charybdis
292
Wandering Rocks
311
Sirens
338
Epilogue
602
Bibliography
604
giant S and snake god
614
Dancing Shiva
615
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 11 - When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing.
Page 27 - Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Page 13 - The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.
Page 11 - Lynch. —In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space.
Page 13 - Stephen went on: —Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.
Page 15 - The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea.

Bibliographic information