engleski

Word Games in Joyce's Ulysses

Joyce's Ulysses epitomizes various aspects of the creative power of language in modern literature. My paper is focused on one particular feature of language in Ulysses, word games. Word games in Ulysses are often discussed in the light of the theories of Wittgenstein or Freud, which appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century when Ulysses was written. My paper, however, addresses word games in Ulysses as a rhetorical strategy that adds to our understanding of the jocoserious tone of the novel and its ambiguous modernist dialogue with the literary tradition. In doing so it draws on Vivien Mercier's statement that irony and parody in Ulysses should be seen in the light of the Irish comic tradition. It aims to demonstrate that word games and puns in Ulysses are not marginal to the understanding of the overall rhetoric of the novel. They are important for an understanding of Joyce's active intertextual dialogue with English literature in general and Shakespeare and Swift in particular. Pun was considered a serious though disputable rhetorical device in the works of Shakespeare, Pope and Donne, but its rhetorical status was marginalized toward the end of the eighteenth century. The paper discusses how Joyce's reading of Shakespeare, Swift (Polite Conversation and Ars Punica), and Skeat's etymological dictionary reflects on his awareness of that tradition and his creative intertextual dialogue with it in Ulysses. It also illustrates some principles on which word games in Ulysses are founded: homonymy, phonetic analogies, folk etymology, polysemy, and arbitrariness of the signifier and signified. It is particularly focused on literary and biblical allusions i.e. quotations or modified quotations or onomastic games with the names of authors and characters activated in word games. It demonstrates how the power of linguistic creativity in word games adds to Joyce's tendency in Ulysses to deliberately dismantle conceptualised structures of meaning and establish an ambivalent dialogue with the literary tradition.

rhetorics; word games; puns; polysemy; homonymy; intertextuality

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