Sensational Joyce

Exploring how Ulysses imitates the human mindat work, connecting close readings to psychological theories of Joyce’s time

In this book, JohnGordon uses historically oriented close readings to demonstrate that Ulyssesis a book that mimics the workings of the human mind. Gordon highlights James Joyce’sexceptional ability to capture and represent lived experiences, showing how Joyce’swritings display the ways specific minds interact with their environments. Ulyssesis portrayed here as having its own evolving consciousness.

Sensational Joyce is the first bookon Joyce’s psychology to engage deeply with theorists beyond Freud, Jung, orLacan. Gordon explains how Joyce used other psychological theories, likeWilliam James’s ideas on stimulus and response, Gestalt psychology, JohnWatson’s behaviorism, and trauma research. The book also includes discussionsof phenomena considered experimental at the time, such as telepathy,telekinesis, precognition, and spiritualism. Gordon examines the characters ofsensitive intellectual Stephen Dedalus and advertising professional Leopold Bloom,following the book’s centers of consciousness into the visionary, hallucinatory,and prophetic final chapters.

Gordon highlightshow Joyce’s unique writing style transforms sensations and stimuli intothoughts and responses. As Ulysses progresses, the sensational—meaningsensory data—becomes sensationalistic. In tracing the contemporary theories ofpsychology evidenced in the novel, Sensational Joyce presents many newand original interpretations that can be applied to other works by Joyce,especially Finnegans Wake.

A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sam Slote