Joycean Criticism Archive

Joyce could not have written Molly Bloom’s soliloquy . . . if he had not somehow found a way in art, if not in life, to recognize the distinct otherness of the loved one.

What we have been calling boredom is not Joyce’s failure, then, but rather his success.

Joyce never actually ‘finished’ 'Ulysses'. Rather, since he was determined that it should be published on his fortieth birthday, February 2, 1922, he had to stop writing it.

If we insist on reading the sequence of styles [in "Ulysses"] as a transition, we will have to confront the awkward fact that the sequence ends not with its most radically avant-garde (or postmodernist) chapter but with a chapter [‘Penelope’] which regresses to the modernist ‘narrative norm’ of the first half.