Buried Dublin: Redeeming Urban History and Collective Memory in James Joyce’s Ulysses
Keywords:
Collective memory, history, Joyce, Dublin, decolonization.Abstract
In Ulysses, Joyce represents modern Dublin as an urban space composed of the sedimentation of its pasts upon one another. Indeed, Dublin’s landscape is represented in Ulysses as a cemetery of past events, buildings, and monuments. Although the apparent significance of this representation of Dublin for the concept of buried cities is rather banal—the past of an urban area participates in the formation of the present cultural, social, and material landscape of that area—Ulysses reframes and expands upon this representation of urban spatio-temporality through its appeal to the concept of redemption. Although Joyce makes visible the history of Dublin’s buried city, it will be noted that this history is represented throughout Ulysses as a nightmare: the buried events, buildings, and monuments of the novel testify to an urban history of defeats, dispossession, and missed opportunities combined with the need for redemption. Yet while Joyce illuminates this need for the redemption of Dublin’s buried city, the novel concludes that the city’s history is irreparable: the resurrection and ‘fixing’ of the catastrophes of the past is never accomplished and, in the end, is represented as impossible. Joyce’s Ulysses therefore presents a foundational problem for the logic of the buried city, even if it does not have an answer for this problem: if the examination of buried cities allows for the revelation of past failures, ruins, catastrophes, and horrors in urban history, is it possible to redeem them in the present?References
Beplate, J. (2007) ‘Stephen’s Lyrical Language: Memory and Imagination in Ulysses.’ Études anglaises, 60, pp. 42-54.
Brady, J. (2006) ‘Dublin at the turn of the century’. In Brady, J and Simms, A (eds) Dublin Through Space and Time (c.900-1900). Dublin: Four Courts Press, pp. 221-281.
Briedis, L. (2016) ‘Locating Vilnius on the Map of Translation.’ In Simon, S. (ed) Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 23-44.
Budgen, F. (1972) James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses and Other Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cheng, VJ. (1995) Joyce, Race, and Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cheng, VJ. (2014) ‘Amnesia, Forgetting, and the Nation in James Joyce’s Ulysses.’ In Frawley, O. and O’Callaghan, K. (eds) Memory Ireland: James Joyce and Cultural Memory, Volume 4. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp. 10-26.
Crinson, M. (2005) ‘Urban memory—an introduction.’ In Crinson, M (ed) Urban Memory: History and amnesia in the modern city. New York: Routledge, pp.xi-xxiii.
Devlin, KJ. (2011) ‘Rereading Ulysses: Indeterminacy, Error, and Fixing the Past.’ Joyce Studies Annual, 2011, pp. 5-19.
Duffy, E. (2000) ‘Disappearing Dublin: Ulysses, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Space.’ In Attridge, D. and Howes, M. (eds) Semicolonial Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 37-57.
Gibbons, L. (2001) ‘”Where Wolfe Tone’s statue was not”: Joyce, monuments and memory.’ In McBride, I. (ed) History and Memory in Modern Ireland. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 139-159.
Gibbons, L. (2014). ‘”Old Haunts”: Joyce, the Republic, and Photographic Memory.’ In Frawley, O. and O’Callaghan K. (eds) Memory Ireland: James Joyce and Cultural Memory, Volume 4. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp. 187-201.
Gibbons, L. (2015) Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Halbwachs, M. (1980) The Collective Memory. Trans. Ditter, F. and Yazdi, V. New York: Harper Colophon.
Jameson, F. (1982) ‘Ulysses in History.’ In McCormack, WJ. and Stead, A. (eds) James Joyce and Modern Literature. New York: Routledge, pp. 125-141.
Johnson, J. (1998) ‘Explanatory Notes.’ In Johnson, J. (ed) Ulysses. New York: Penguin, 2008, pp. 763-980.
Jones, EC. (2014) ‘Ghosts Through Absence.’ In Frawley, O. and O’Callaghan, K. (eds) Memory Ireland: James Joyce and Cultural Memory, Volume 4. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp. 125-144.
Joyce, J. (1984) Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Prepared by Gabler, HW., Steppe, W., & Melchior, C. New York: Garland Publishing.
Joyce, J. (1992). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Deane, S. London: Penguin.
Kearns, K. (1994) Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.
Keogh, D. (1998) Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Cork: Cork University Press.
Kincaid, A. (2006) Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Klein, KL. (2000) ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse.’ Representations, 69, pp. 127-150.
McBride, I. (2001) ‘Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland.’ In McBride, I. (ed) History and Memory in Modern Ireland. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-42.
McCarthy, PA. (1984) ‘Joyce’s Unreliable Catechist: Mathematics and the Narration of “Ithaca.”’ ELH, 51(3), pp. 605-618.
Mitchel, J. (1882) The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps). Dublin: R & T Washbourne.
Morse, D. (1996) ‘“I’m Irish! I Was Born Here!” The Conflict Between Nationalism and Internationalism in James Joyce’s Ulysses.’ In Zach, W. and Goodwin, K. (eds) Nationalism vs. Internationalism. Tubingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, pp. 177-185.
Nora, P. (1989) ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.’ Representations, 26, pp. 7-24.
Norris, M. (2006) ‘Fact Fiction, and Anti-Semitism in the “Cyclops” Episode of Joyce’s Ulysses.’ Journal of Narrative Theory, 36 (2), pp. 163-189.
Ó Gráda, C. (2006) Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Prunty, J. (1998) Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography. Portland, Oregon: Irish Academic Press.
Rasmussen Goloubeva, I. (2013) ‘”That’s the Music of the Future”: James Joyce’s Ulysses and the Writing of a Difficult History.’ Modernism/modernity, 20(4), pp. 685-708.
Reizbaum, M. (1999) James Joyce’s Judaic Other. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Richard, J. (1999) Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Raleigh: Duke University Press.
Ricoeur, P. (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Blamey, K. and Pellauer, D. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rossi, A. (1982) The Architecture of the City. Trans. Ghirardo, D. and Ockman, J. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rubenstein, M. (2010) Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press.
Ulin, J. (2011) ‘”Famished Ghosts”: Famine Memory in James Joyce’s Ulysess.’ Joyce Studies Annual, pp. 20-63.
Whelan, K. (2002) ‘The Memories of “The Dead”.’ The Yale Journal of Criticism, 15(1), pp. 59-97.
Winston, G. (2014) ‘”Aquacities of Thought and Language”: The Political Ecology of Water in Ulysses.’ In Brazeau, J. and Gladwin, D. (eds) Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce. Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 136-158.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
