Utopian Models in James Joyce’s “Ulysses” as a Discursive Transformation

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Abstract:

The two passages from the 15^th episode of “Ulysses” (Circe) are viewed as a parody of utopian models that started to be implemented in the beginning of the 20^th century. Such utopian archetypes, as of space, catastrophe, chaos and a Saviour are attracted as a major focus of analysis. The context of Bloom’s utopian model is presented in the form of a play that runs in the mind of major characters that undergo endless metamorphoses. In these passages Leopold Bloom plays a ritual role of a sovereign, implementing an archetype of a Saviour, who, after being crowned, immediately starts transforming his kingdom, thus bringing into life the archetypes of catastrophe and turning the Chaos into the Order via force. For the prototypal basis of Bloom’s utopian model Joyce chose Biblical New Jerusalem that was rolled into one with real Dublin nominally travestied in the text into the new Bloomusalem. The means of discursive transformations include a dense intertextual cluster and the number of discourse oppositions, described by M. Foucault. All these discursive transformations are caused by converting of “the uttered” into “the visible”, the process that Yu. Lotman thought to be reversed to the procedure of discourse production, and to be possible only when the sphere of the subconscious is transposed into the sphere the conscious.

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