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Joyce and the Colonial Commodity
DC Field | Value | Language |
---|---|---|
dc.contributor.author | Nolan, Emer | - |
dc.date.accessioned | 2010-01-12T01:40:39Z | - |
dc.date.available | 2010-01-12T01:40:39Z | - |
dc.date.issued | 2004 | - |
dc.identifier.citation | 인문논총, Vol.52, pp. 23-39 | - |
dc.identifier.issn | 1598-3021 | - |
dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10371/29507 | - |
dc.description.abstract | Joyce depicts Irelands underdeveloped, colonial economy in Ulysses. But
he also shows us how, in certain historical conditions, commodities become invested with political, utopian desire. Ulysses demonstrates the power of these utopian fantasies, but also understands their limits. Joyce also appreciates that his own artistic practice is implicated in consumer society, its pleasures and its pitfalls. His great novel Ulysses can therefore usefully be re-read in the context of Irelands twenty-first century Celtic Tiger economy. 1) I will begin by discussing a passage not from Joyce, but from another great modern Irish storyteller, Maurice OSullivan. In his book, Twenty years a-growing, a memoir of his childhood in the Blasket Islands off the coast of Co. Kerry in the south west of Ireland, he tells how in the course of the First World War, all kinds of wonderful things were washed up on the shores of his native island. These had all come from ships destroyed in the war at sea, and included luxuries like wine and chocolate and precious items such as gold watches. The older inhabitants of the island thought that the paradise described in Irish legends had finally arrived for them. However, the islanders also discovered many bodies of those lost at sea on the beaches. 2) This story illustrated some features of the modern in colonial or underdeveloped conditions. To some extent, the very new connects with the archaic as the old legends are remembered. Note the excitement and the holiday feeling of the islanders. But the bodies of the dead also remind them of violence and atrocity. This is the kind of nuanced understanding of modernity, and of capitalism in the context of Ireland, that I believe we need in order to understand Joyces writing. Ireland did not see any process of steady industrialization in the course of the twentieth-century. Rather the economic boom of the 1990s brought for most Irish people their very first experiences of prosperity and the consumer society. Joyces writings help us to appreciate some important aspects of this historical experience. 3) Joyce was fond of describing the Irish past in modern images, especially that of the busy, populous metropolis (which Dublin was not, in his own time!). In this he tends to abolish the distinction between the traditional and the new. The major conflict in Ulysses appears to be that between the metropolitan, modern Leopold Bloom and his fellow citizens who are xenophobic, backward-looking and nationalist. This culminates in the conflicts between Bloom and the citizen in Cylops. However, both parties to this conflict have been somewhat misrepresented, I believe. The nationalists are also modernizers; the modern man (Bloom) is by no means the happiest of human beings. To some extent, he — like many modern people — seeks compensation in the pleasures of the city and of the commodity for things that are absent in his own life — a sense of purpose or belonging, or even a happy family life. 4) In this way, we can understand Joyce as a superb interpreter of the culture of modernity. He shows us how modern culture can serve as a phantasmagoric substitute for a real Utopia — an ideal human community. Although he commodified his own art in the pursuit of aesthetic perfection, conferring on Ulysses an auratic sense of transcendence and accomplishment, we can also read in his great novel the traces of the impoverished (and still unfinished) history out of which it grows. | - |
dc.language.iso | en | - |
dc.publisher | 서울대학교 인문대학 인문학연구원 | - |
dc.title | Joyce and the Colonial Commodity | - |
dc.type | SNU Journal | - |
dc.citation.journaltitle | 인문논총(Journal of humanities) | - |
dc.citation.endpage | 39 | - |
dc.citation.pages | 23-39 | - |
dc.citation.startpage | 23 | - |
dc.citation.volume | 52 | - |
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