User:Rsl12/UlyssesSignificance

Literary Significance of Ulysses
In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.[ref 5]

Ulysses has been called "the most prominent landmark in modernist literature", a work where life's complexities are depicted with "unprecedented, and unequalled, linguistic and stylistic virtuosity".  Whether or not Ulysses is a complete success is a matter for debate. Virginia Woolf noted that "Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe--immense in daring, terrific in disaster."

Joyce's influence can be seen in the works of authors such as William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison.

A year- by-year search of references to the seminal modernist novel in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index indicates a gradual dwindling of academic interest since the late 1970s. The more general Nexis database tells a similar story: While the book is still referenced several hundred times a year, most of these are placeholder allusions that cite "Ulysses" as an example of a difficult classic, the kind of book only a college professor could love. 

Stream of Consciousness
Ulysses has been called the finest example of the use of stream-of-consciousness in modern fiction, going deeper and farther than any other novelist in handling interior monologue.  The technique employed by Joyce has been praised for its faithful representation of the flow of thought, feeling, mental reflection, and shifts of mood.  This style has allowed for "brilliant insights into the workings of the human mind" to be revealed. The critic Edmund Wilson noted that Ulysses attempts to render "as precisely and as directly as it is possible in words to do, what our participation in life is like--or rather, what it seems to us like as from moment to moment we live." 

Unity
Joyce throws up metaphors, symbols, ambiguities, and overtones which gradually link themselves together so as to form a network of connections binding the whole work. 

System of Correspondences
This system of connections gives the novel a wide, more universal significance, as "Leopold Bloom becomes a modern Ulysses, an Everyman in a Dublin which becomes a microcosm of the world." 

Eliot described this system as the "mythic method": "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." 

Its style is marked with rare ingenuity, witticism, and satirical flashes.

Use of language
The staccato, fragmented language of Bloom's thought, contrasts with the punctuationless, flowing style of Molly's. 

Ulysses contains "almost every imaginable form of narrative." 

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