Oral Presentations - Session 1C: UC 330
READING NIETZSCHE IN JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES
Presentation Type
Presentation
Faculty Mentor’s Full Name
Robert Baker
Faculty Mentor’s Department
English
Abstract / Artist's Statement
James Joyce had not yet begun his most productive years of writing when he first became acquainted with the work of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a man whose deep skepticism about the traditional views of life and the world likely spoke to some of the young and aspiring writer’s concerns and experiences. By the time Joyce started to write his epic novel, Ulysses, he possessed a well-developed and nuanced grasp of several fundamental dimensions of Nietzsche’s thought: not only did he understand the concepts of the “death of God,” the Ubërmensch, and the eternal recurrence, but he grasped both the way that they fit together in Nietzsche’s philosophy and their larger implications. It should not be surprising, then, that these ideas find their way into Joyce’s novel. In this presentation I will introduce and discuss a final research paper that illuminates the role that Nietzsche’s thought plays in Joyce’s Ulysses and argues for the value of reading Ulysses through a Nietzschean interpretive frame. Specifically, I will discuss the ways in which Nietzsche’s ideas contribute to a new understanding of the novel’s main characters, and how this understanding helps provide us with a better sense of the novel as a whole.
Category
Humanities
READING NIETZSCHE IN JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES
UC 330
James Joyce had not yet begun his most productive years of writing when he first became acquainted with the work of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a man whose deep skepticism about the traditional views of life and the world likely spoke to some of the young and aspiring writer’s concerns and experiences. By the time Joyce started to write his epic novel, Ulysses, he possessed a well-developed and nuanced grasp of several fundamental dimensions of Nietzsche’s thought: not only did he understand the concepts of the “death of God,” the Ubërmensch, and the eternal recurrence, but he grasped both the way that they fit together in Nietzsche’s philosophy and their larger implications. It should not be surprising, then, that these ideas find their way into Joyce’s novel. In this presentation I will introduce and discuss a final research paper that illuminates the role that Nietzsche’s thought plays in Joyce’s Ulysses and argues for the value of reading Ulysses through a Nietzschean interpretive frame. Specifically, I will discuss the ways in which Nietzsche’s ideas contribute to a new understanding of the novel’s main characters, and how this understanding helps provide us with a better sense of the novel as a whole.