Vol. 17 (2024): Contemporary Issues of Literary Criticism Literatures of Small Countries and Challenges of the Modern Global World
World Literature and National Literatures

Modernist Polychronotopia: A Chronotopic Approach to Urban Timespace in James Joyce’s Ulysses

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  • Nino Tsurtsumia
Nino Tsurtsumia
Akaki Tsereteli State University

Published 2024-12-20

Keywords

  • Dublin,
  • chronotopic configurations,
  • dichotomy,
  • urban space

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to examines the representation of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) through the lens of „overarching” chronotopes (Romantic/Idyllic, Naturalistic/Documentary, Decadent/Self-referential, and avant-garde/modernist). The paper will focus on the juxtaposition of historic (diachronic) and mythic (synchronic) aspects of Dublin as a transhistorical city. The naturalistic description of urban space in "Wandering Rocks" makes sharp contrast with the hallucinatory atmosphere and phantasmagoric symbolism of "Circe" episode. In the "Penelope" episode the dichotomy between historical and mythic poles is abolished through the “spatialization of time”, unifying spatio-temporal configuration that can be referred to as “mythopoeic chronotope”.

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