Point of View in Ulysses: a critical application of Palmer’s approach to the representation of consciousness
type: CreativeWork
description: Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel that has proven notoriously hard to pin down in terms of what is going on at any given point. Viewpoints shift throughout, and at times even appear to merge into one another. Previous approaches to point of view in the novel have tended to use one of a number of discrete analytical approaches, looking primarily at explicitly marked indicators of either consciousness or deixis. They have ignored sources of information about fictional minds that are not explicitly cued as such, such as those found in the adverbs used to describe characters’ speech, or in narrative descriptions of their actions. My contention was such analytical approaches, focusing on explicitly marked depictions of consciousness in novels (for which Ulysses is famous), might be strengthened by looking at generally ignored, more subtle indications of mental functioning, in order to provide a fuller picture of what is going on in this complex work. All indicators of consciousness are seen as valid within this approach; it is therefore one that incorporates any example of situated mental functioning to be found in the novel. Drawing upon potentially any indicator of mental functioning, within a more holistic overview of consciousness in the novel, was found to provide a fuller, yet still linguistically focused account, and one which was also more cognitively salient. It is derived in part from Palmer’s ideas regarding how characters’ situated mental functioning might be tracked, using non-standard indicators of consciousness. Such information, Palmer has suggested, is stored in continuing consciousness frames for characters that then feed into embedded narratives for them. This is then stored within their overall ‘fictional’ encyclopaedias for the text in hand. This is a subsection of readers’ much larger ‘internal’ encyclopaedias, which contain all of the knowledge they possess; this is narrowed down to only the most relevant elements by the text itself i.e. through a text-dr…
abstract: Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel that has proven notoriously hard to pin down in terms of what is going on at any given point. Viewpoints shift throughout, and at times even appear to merge into one another. Previous approaches to point of view in the novel have tended to use one of a number of discrete analytical approaches, looking primarily at explicitly marked indicators of either consciousness or deixis. They have ignored sources of information about fictional minds that are not explicitly cued as such, such as those found in the adverbs used to describe characters’ speech, or in narrative descriptions of their actions. My contention was such analytical approaches, focusing on explicitly marked depictions of consciousness in novels (for which Ulysses is famous), might be strengthened by looking at generally ignored, more subtle indications of mental functioning, in order to provide a fuller picture of what is going on in this complex work. All indicators of consciousness are seen as valid within this approach; it is therefore one that incorporates any example of situated mental functioning to be found in the novel. Drawing upon potentially any indicator of mental functioning, within a more holistic overview of consciousness in the novel, was found to provide a fuller, yet still linguistically focused account, and one which was also more cognitively salient. It is derived in part from Palmer’s ideas regarding how characters’ situated mental functioning might be tracked, using non-standard indicators of consciousness. Such information, Palmer has suggested, is stored in continuing consciousness frames for characters that then feed into embedded narratives for them. This is then stored within their overall ‘fictional’ encyclopaedias for the text in hand. This is a subsection of readers’ much larger ‘internal’ encyclopaedias, which contain all of the knowledge they possess; this is narrowed down to only the most relevant elements by the text itself i.e. through a text-dr…
author: McGrath Wilkinson, David William George
language: en
date published: 2012-03
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:35:38Z
provider: University of Central Lancashire
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Central Lancashire