Özet:

Regarded as one of the masterpieces of modernist literature, James Joyce’s Ulysses was serialized between 1918 and 1920, and was published in 1922 in book form. Both in the period of its serialization and since its publication, there have been frequent discussions about Ulysses, and scholars have tried to tackle it from within diverse interpretive frameworks. In these interpretive and analytical endeavors, Ulysses’ extraordinarily rich formal quality has always occupied a prominent place. This article focuses on some of the major formal analytical approaches to Joyce’s novel, and it examines various kinds of interpretive practices carried out on Ulysses as well as the meanings that were sought in the text as a whole. The discussion made in the article underlines the problematic aspects of the approaches that choose to apply Homer’s epic the Odyssey and its content to Joyce’s work in a mode of one-to-one matching, including the musical reading of Ulysses’ form. Moreover, it is argued that the phenomena of fragmentation and loss of totality, the dominant social and subjective experience of the period that gave rise to modernist literature, should be taken to the center in Ulysses’ formal analyses.