Ulysses and the Metamorphosis of Stephen Dedalus

Front Cover
Bucknell University Press, 2001 - 222 pages
This study makes the case that the novel's intricate self-consciousness begins as a very recognizable story: the 'Kunstlerroman.' In such a reading, Ulysses emerges as the story of the time-obsessed Stephen Dedalus, who desires to compose a masterful chronicle that will one day rival the timeless narratives of Ovid and Homer. McBride's analysis treats at length Stephen's poetic theories and compositions, examinig them as clear forerunners to the novel that the reader is reading. The culminating point is the claim that the figures of Leopold and Molly Bloom may be elaborate fictions created by Stephen.
 

Contents

Not Biography But Metafiction
29
The Ineluctable Modality Stephens Quest for Immortality
38
Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before Stephens Poetics and the Creation of Ulysses
61
A Perfect Wreath The Nostos as the Novels Source
99
Beyond the Modality of the Audible The Silent Subtext in Stephens Story About Bloom
124
The Circle of Penelope Weaving and Unweaving the Artists Image
172
Notes
185
Bibliography
204
Index
217
Copyright

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Page 12 - We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.
Page 19 - What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars.

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