Modernism is a cultural, artistc and litterary movement which devolped in the early three deacades of the 19th century. The best expressions of Modernist fiction are Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. They are aware the traditional novel can't express the true essence of life and so they seek for new litterary techniques. While the traditional novel is insterested in the external realty, the two wtiters focus their attention on the individual's subjectivity. They study human being's imperfections, weeknesses and fragility and they want to convey what happens in his interiority. Human being's feelings, espectations and memories flow without a chronological order in his mind and form a strem of consciousness. In order to communicate the strem of consciousness the two writers adopt different techniques. Virginia Woolf uses the interior monolque, a third person omniscient narrator, who is eclipsed in order to make emerge an individual's coscience, a free indirected style and the shift of the point od view. Connectors are still used and the reader can still distinguish internal time from the external one. James Joyce makes a step forward and in order to commiunicate the strem of consciousness he adopts the total stream of consciusness techinque. It is total because there are not connectors and punctuantion. In this way the reader have to understand and interpretate the links between the words. James Joyce, as Virgina Woolf, uses a language that appeals to senses to render realistically what happens in the character's mind.
In Modernism time is chronological, everything is relative, all the values fall, there is a sense of instability and physicists and psychologists revulozionized the way of seeing the world. For example Mr Jung says humand being isn't influenced by his rationality or by the environment, but what he does is linked with his race. Before writing Ulysses, James Joyce writes the Dubliners, a collection of short stories that tell about the paralysis of Dublin. Dublin becomes the metaphor of the inability of acting. James Joyce adopts a symbolic realism in order to reveal the deep reality behind the apparence. The reality is formed by symbols.
In the Ulysses the reader's role is very demanding because he is asked to cooperate with the text with his experience. James Joyce got the idea from French symbolism. He creates a sound link between the words.
The myth of the Odyssey is the structural principle of the Ulysses (Michael Cunningham uses Mrs Dalloway as structuring principle). The myth demonstrates human being isn't changed because he always wants to desire, to possess, to know... Thomas Eliot calls the mothod used by James Joyce mythical method, "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history".