The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time, and Tradition in Ulysses

This book examines the relations between the textual organization of Ulysses and the notions of time, language and poetics implicit in the novel. Making use of recent developments in philosophy and literary theory, it argues that Ulysses is a complex transitional text involving various degrees of mediation between opposing impulses such as naturalism and schematism, unification and detotalization. Examining Joyce's use of repetition, the use of a differentiated and heterogeneous temporal experience, and Joyce's early aesthetic theories, this book clarifies the notion of tradition implied in Ulysses in relation to other strands of modernism and post modernism.