"Signs on a white field": James Joyce, Ulysses, and the postcolonial sublime
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2004
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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eng
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Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine the ways in which James Joyce's Ulysses is imbued with a kind of Postcolonial sublime. In doing so my hope is to prove that Joyce's text is, in a way, a performance: through his wide-ranging use of distinct figures, tropes, and motifs, Joyce acts out and reconciles himself with the trauma of colonization. Most importantly, however, in Ulysses Joyce attempts to articulate the ontological status of a group--the colonized--that has heretofore gone radically unarticulated. "Nothing can describe well enough the extraordinary deficiency of the colonized," Albert Memmi writes, pointing to the colonial subject's under-representation; but in Ulysses, Joyce without question succeeds in figuring this "deficiency" by upending traditional notions of "text," "identity," and "language." In the end, Joyce subverts the very medium in which he writes: he appropriates the tongue of the colonizer in order to re-establish himself in the aftermath of colonization.