The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends MeetThis original and wide-ranging study explores the "economies" of Ulysses using a number of different critical and theoretical methods. Not only do the economic circumstances of the characters form a significant part of the novel's realistic subject matter but the relationships between characters are also based upon modes of economic exchange. Moreover, the narrative itself is filled with economic terms that serve as tropes for its themes, events, and techniques. Some of the subjects and topics covered include Joyce's own "spendthrift" background, gift exchanges and reciprocity as a fundamental means of reader/author relationship in the novel, money and language, Bloom as an "economic man," the "narrative economy" of "Wandering Rocks," the relationship between commerce and eroticism, the function of sacrifice in the creation of value, counterfeiting, forgery, and other crimes of writing, and a demonstration of how the encounter between Stephen and Bloom "makes both ends meet." The book brings together not only the opposed economic impulses in Joyce but also the conflicting strains of regulation and excess in the novel's structural economy. |
Contents
Miser and Spendthrift | 1 |
2 | 35 |
Economic Man | 70 |
4 | 111 |
The Intertextual Economy | 203 |
Cyclops and the Economy of Excess | 250 |
Erotic Commerce I | 280 |
Erotic Commerce II | 319 |
The Money Question at the Back of Everything | 357 |
Making Returns | 393 |
| 468 | |
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Common terms and phrases
advertising Aeolus aesthetic artistic assets balance becomes borrowed bourgeois Boylan characters Circe circulation clichés coin commodity Conmee consumer counterfeit countinghouse currency Cyclops Deasy debtorship debts Dedalus depicts Dignam discourse drinks Dublin earn economic encounter ends meet episode episode's erotic commerce Eumaeus excess expenditure father female fiction forgery function Gerty Gerty's gift economy gift exchange give gold grace hermaphrodite identity intertextual Ireland Irish Ithaca James Joyce Joyce Joyce's Kernan labor language Leopold Bloom Lestrygonians linguistic literary male means merely metempsychosis Molly Molly's moral Mulligan narrative narrator nomic novel Odysseus origins Oxen Penelope political potlatch prostitution psychic Purefoys reader reading reciprocity relationship role seems sense sexual Shakespeare shillings Shylock signifies Simon Simon Dedalus Sirens social spend spiritual Stephen and Bloom Stephen Dedalus story syllepsis symbolic textual thereby tion transformation Ulysses usury verbal Wandering Rocks whore Wonderworker words writing