Lyrical opacity
Lyrical opacity

The roots of lyrical narration in Ulysses

Summary/Abstract: James Joyce’s Ulysses is not merely a “story of a day.” It is a poetic texture calling attention to itself by way of the versatile verbal constructions it manifests, defying traditional novelistic categories such as plot or character. That is, Ulysses – due to its self-reflexively eminent structures of speech – foregrounds thought and senserelations instead of plot, fashions textual voices instead of building character. Accordingly, the narratorial voices surfacing within the texture also contribute to the weaving of the poetically eminent fabric. Presenting modes of a diffuse textural presence in their constant shifting and through their merging with individual voices, narratorial modes of speech yield a kind of indeterminacy that not only conceives defamiliarizing sense-relations, but also allows sense and perception, speech and thought, image and emotion to become conspicuous. In this way, the prose of Ulysses is saturated with a sense of lyricality.

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