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Gilman, Lori K.

English

2006

MA

My thesis explores the changes in media and technology that occurred during the period of Modernism and the ways in which these changes are reflected in the revolutionary style of James Joyce's Ulysses. I juxtapose Ulysses with film of Joyce's time in an effort to expose the ways in which film of the 1920's depicts language, satisfaction, and the body. I examine the ways in which Joyce captures this new perspective in his writing. I study the non-linearity of Joyce's narrative and in the seeming-yet-non-linearity of film, and Joyce's personal interests and intents concerning this type of narrative construction. I attempt to explain that these things are linguistically imbedded, and that the characters of Ulysses and of many films fail in their attempts at jouissance because of their inability to escape the structure of the language and/or media in which they exist. I outline the ways in which men and women are trapped in perceptions that subjugate one another by way of the ideals present in romance novels and women's magazines of the 1920's, and how these ideas are disseminated during the shift toward screen-based entertainment. I study these issues through an analysis of Lacan's ideas about the body, the gaze, and the language in which these things are communicated.