James Joyce

Modernism is a cultural movement which has a cosmopolitan character. Its aim is to put subjectivity at the centre of its investigation. According to this aim, Modernist writers focused their attention on consciousness novel. They thought that the traditional novel was not able to return life ( with reference to the extract from The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf) , to convey what life is like because it neglected to return it in its shape ( called by Virginia Woolf " a luminous halo").

That's why writers such as Virginia Woolf decided to adopt new techniques, as the interior monologue, the shift of the point of view, the "moments of being", a metaphorical use of language ( which reminds to poetry) and decided to refuse a chronological time arrangement. She preferred to follow the flashes of conscious, going forward and backwards in a simultaneous concept of time ( a typical Modernist concept of time) where the present includes past memories and future expectations.

Besides Virginia Woolf, James Joyce is considered the greatest novelist of the Western World in his time. He took experiments to the maximum. He was interesting in conveying reality as it really is and he adopted myth as the structuring principle of his novel. Indeed, the myth of Ulysses Odyssey provides the content to give unity and organisation to his masterpiece. What Joyce was trying to do was to render the reality of his time in the most realistic way he knew; that's why he adopted the total stream of consciousness technique.

His prose is very complex. There are no connectors, no punctuation, no paragraph.

According to the workings of a stream of consciousness, conscious flows apparently in a circular way. It follows that the position of the reader becomes of utmost importance, he is asked a lot. Indeed, he is asked a lot to the reader, who had to provide the logical and semantic connections to the flow of thoughts and words.

He also reduced plot to the minimum in that what he was mainly interested in was the inner life of his characters.

Ulysses  was written in 1922. Ulysses is about the life of three characters: Leopold Bloom, His wife Penelope and Stephen Dedalus , a young man  he met in one of Dublin's pubs.

Ulysses is about a single day in Dublin in June 1904. The protagonist ,an arrogant poverty stricken artist and intellectual , in spiritual exile from his country and family, is seeking a father while Leopold Bloom is a Jewish advertising-space salesman. By virtue of being a Jew , also in exile, he's seeking a sun. they represent, in essence, Telemachus and Odysseus.

As Omer's Odyssey is the story of a quest, Joyce's Ulysses has a quest as it central theme, for the day's progress also represents a journey.