Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture

Shows how Joyce's narrative styles and his protagonists' perceptions are shaped by visual technologies, including dioramas, stereoscopes, mutoscopes and film.

Sicker opens a new chapter in the inter-relationship of high art and popular cultural attractions with this detailed analysis of the influence of film and visual technologies on the ultimate modernist text, Ulysses. Beyond Joyce scholars, it will appeal to those interested in the philosophy and/or science of visual perception.Although Joyce was losing his sight when he wrote Ulysses, Stephen's and Bloom's visual experiences are extraordinarily rich and complex. Absorbing the influences of popular visual attractions such as dioramas, stereoscopes and mutoscopes, their perceptions of Dublin are shaped by what Walter Benjamin calls 'unconscious optics'. Analyzing closely the texture of their impressions and of Joyce's prismatic narrative styles, Philip Sicker explores the phenomenon of sight from a wide-ranging set of perspectives: eighteenth-century epistemology (Locke and Berkeley), theories of the flaneur (Baudelaire and Benjamin), Italian Futurist art (Marinetti and Boccioni), photography (Barthes and Sontag), and the silent films Joyce watched in Dublin and Trieste. The concept of 'spectacle' as a mechanically-constructed visual experience informs Sicker's examination of mediated perception and emerges as a hallmark of modernist culture itself. This study is an important contribution to the growing interest in how deeply the philosophy and science of visual perception influenced modernism.