Miroslaw Balka, a, e, i, o, u, 1998

Michael Rogers, Beehive for Molly Bloom, 2002

Robert Motherwell, Ulysses, tailpiece, 1988

David James, Post-Modern/Postmodernism

cant remember who to h/t

Richard Kearney

David Foster Wallace’s copy of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce. 

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.

Maurice Beebe, “Ulysses”, 187

In his 1996 essay “Ulysses and the Twentieth Century” (which appears in Moretti’s Modern Epic: The Two World System from Goethe to García Márquez), Franco Moretti also speaks of “a first Ulysses . . . and a second Ulysses, with equally distinctive features” (183). He expands this, though, by theorizing that “there is even a third Ulysses, albeit far more indistinct than the other two,” that occupies “the zone of transition from one to the other – when Joyce is abandoning his first great technique (but does not yet know it), and is seeking his second (but has not found yet it)” (183).

James Joyce once claimed himself to be “the foolish author of a wise book” (Ellmann 471), 

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

Frederic Jameson, “Ulysses”, 187

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.

Michael Groden, 13

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.

Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 55