Chapter One Introduction

　1.1　Review of Joycean Studies

　1.2　Feasibility of the Subjectivity Approach

　1.3　Modern Identity in Ulysses

Chapter Two Characterization

　2.1　Bloom: The Modern Antihero

　　　2.1.1　The Dethroned Father

　　　2.1.2　The Wandering Jew

　　　2.1.3　The Heterogeneous Nobody

　　　2.1.4　The Decentered Self

　2.2　Stephen: The Problematic Individual

　　　2.2.1　The Rebellious Son

　　　2.2.2　The Ambitious Artist

　　　2.2.3　The Frustrated Intellectual

　　　2.2.4　The Divided Selves

　2.3　Molly: The Indeterminate Female Identity

　　　2.3.1　The “Constructed” Woman

　　　2.3.2　The Modern Penelope

　　　2.3.3　The Speaking Subject

　　　2.3.4　The Inclusive Self

Chapter Three  Narration

　3.1　Narrator

　3.2　Psychological Time and Space

　3.3　Psychological Reality

Chapter Four  Language

　4.1　Expression

　4.2　Heterogeneity

4.3　Semiotic Function

　Chapter Five Conclusions

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Works Cited and Consulted

Chapter One Introduction

This book explores man's modern identity as individual subject in Ulysses with the help of subjectivity approach. As individuals are engulfed in troubled relationships with others and society in this novel, they withdraw into their innermost recesses for solace and consolation. Thus the Inward Turn in Ulysses reflects the conflict between individual and society, the opposition between the innermost consciousness and the outside world. All these lay the foundation for the revelation of modern identity in Ulysses, since man is largely defined in relation to the society he resides in and by his underlying ways of thinking and knowing. The analysis of modern identity in Ulysses begins with a review of Joycean studies in the first chapter. It also discusses the contemporary identity study of Ulysses and analyzes the feasibility of the subjectivity approach. As subjectivity emphasizes the relation of interiority with the outside world, the application of this approach can illustrate the features of modern identity in Ulysses，which is one of the representative witnesses to the Inward Turn in modern literature. 

1.1　Review of Joycean Studies

Early critics usually concerned themselves with textual explication, the analysis of character and plot, the poetic and rhetorical patterns of Joyce's prose and poetry. These studies usually started from a less theoretical position, paying attention to textual facts and element. There are also those critics who investigated the rich symbolism and polysemy of Joyce's writing. The notable achievements might include Cliver Hart's Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake and Roland McHugh's Annotations to Finnegans Wake. 

The articulation of Joyce's radical and revolutionary qualities had to wait until the systematic application of theories. “The history of Joyce studies can in some ways be seen as a microcosm of the historical development of critical theory and its application to literary texts.”(Roughly x) The flourish of Joyce criticism started with the rise of structuralism that was either accompanied or followed by semiotics, feminism, Marxist approach and poststructuralism. In recent years, a series of new approaches to Joyce's study have developed out of the earlier theoretical innovations, reflecting the successive waves that passed through literary studies. They have provided novel interpretations and discovered unsuspected connections. Many of these have involved fuller attention to historical and cultural contexts, especially the Irish context within which and against which Joyce wrote. The new avenues include cultural studies (or the study of popular or consumer culture), colonial and postcolonial studies, gay and lesbian studies.

The advent of structuralism has contributed much to revealing the radical nature of Joyce's writing. Robert Scholes is both a Joycean scholar and a theorist who has written on the history of narrative, structuralism and semiotics. In Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction, he sees the reluctance to Joyce's work as a result of the anxieties that some people experience in witnessing the structuralist assault upon the traditional idea of the self as a unified, individual subject. Scholes traces the development of the ideas of characters in Joyce's work as a movement from a bioenergetic concept of characters bounded by their own skins, and of actions which take place in one location of spacetime, to a cybernetic concept of character in which the notion of ego begins to be dispersed. Margot Norris's The Decentred Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis is one of the first AngloAmerican assessments of the Wake from a poststructuralist perspective. For Norris, the fluid characters are continually changing their identities and exchanging their qualities with those of other characters. The distinction between self and other ceases to be clear, as the characters are subject to the structural process of change and mutability.

Semiotics is usually applied to the study of Joyce's last two works, since their ambiguity and selfreferentiality can best illustrate the semiotic process. Julia Kristeva, a French semiotician, has not written any major studies devoted exclusively to Joyce, but her work reveals a significant understanding of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. She cites Joyce along with Proust and Kafka as creators of a polyphonic, modern novel incorporating carnivalesque structures, which has doubled or multiplied the portrait of characters in his novels.

Feminism became a central issue in Joyce studies in the last decade of the 20th century. It was concerned about Joyce's attitude towards females and the nature of his portrayal of girls and women in his writing. Women in Joyce is a collection of essays which look at his female characters from a variety of perspectives and include several feminist assessments of Joyce's treatment of females. In Joyce and Feminism, Bonnie Kime Scott establishes a set of feminist frameworks for studying Joyce and examines the female characters.

Psychoanalytic criticism is an area that flourished in the last decades of the 20th century. Psychoanalytic critics of Joyce can be divided into the Freudian, Jungian and Lacanian groups. In Joyce between Jung and Freud, Sheldon Brivic sees Joyce's characters personifying introverted and extroverted characteristics. The type personified by Stephen is spiritual and stable, and easily disturbed by changes in identity, while the one personified by Bloom is physical and mutable. In Joyce's Book of the Dark: “Finnegans Wake”, John Bishop argues that it is from Vico, and not Freud that Joyce gains his understanding. He believes that Vico anticipated most of Freud's ideas.

Marxist criticism investigates Joyce's writing from the theoretical perspective offered by Marxism. It focuses on a work of art as both the product of the cultural, sociological, economic, and political ideology of its time and as a producer and reworker of these same factors. In Crisis and Criticism, Alice West holds the opinion that Stephen and Bloom are interdependent and conceived in terms of relation, not of distinct demarcated consciousness. Another Marxist critic, Frederic Jameson points out that Ulysses, as part of the modernist literary tradition, focuses on the disconnectedness between man and society, as a consequence of a massproduced environment.

Colonialism and postcolonialism are the important parts of contemporary Joyce studies. Postcolonial scholars study colonialism and nationalism in their visibility, as the subjects of explicit discussion and struggle, and in their invisibility, as the secret structures that underlie much of Western intellectual and political life. In “Joyce, Colonialism and Nationalism” of the second edition of the Joyce Companion, Marjorie Howes offers a detailed description of Joyce's engagement with colonialism and nationalism on the smallest and the largest horizons: that of individual words and that of the formal qualities of each text as a whole. 

Cultural studies include the efforts to restore the multiple contexts of Joyce and his works. In The Joyce Companion of Cambridge (2004), Jennifer Wicke argues that every aspect of mass culture and media technology makes an appearance across the spectrum of Joyce's writing in Finnegans Wake, that Gerty in Ulysses is a product of popular culture in Dublin.

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