Ulysses as an Intertextual Performance: Figuration, Travesty, and the Staging of Text
Ulysses as an Intertextual Performance: Figuration, Travesty, and the Staging of Text

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the figure of Ulysses as an intertextual performance rather than as a stable character or heroic archetype. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s and Tiphaine Samoyault’s theories of intertextuality, as well as Erika Fischer-Lichte’s concept of performance as a transformative, autopoietic event and Richard Schechner’s notion of restored behaviour, the study argues that Ulysses functions not as a subject but as a dynamic textual operator. This spectral, reactivable presence traverses literature as a mechanism of poetic and structural destabilisation. From Ulysses by James Joyce to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, the name of Ulysses is cited, fragmented, erased, or reconfigured through citation, travesty, repetition, and rhythmic transformation. Intertextuality is treated as a scenographic device—a performative space in which meaning is produced not by identity but by echo, rupture, and variation. In diasporic and postcolonial literatures, Ulysses becomes a spectral operator—no longer a returning hero, but a figural rhythm of loss and non-return. Ithaca is not a destination but a gap in the narrative field. Ulysses, as a performance of intertextuality, exemplifies a broader mode of literary existence: writing as affective deviation, as unfinished recurrence, and as poetic persistence in the absence of closure.

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