New perspectives on James Joyce’s Ulysses – a literary-linguistic approach

Abstract: This paper discusses the somewhat oxymoronic tie between Ulysses' poststructuralist effect and its structural design. Observing the changes in the linguistic register and the corresponding syntactical modes in various episodes of the novel, it points at a gradual reduction of the authorial voice and its ultimate displacement by the text itself. Whereas the first episodes of the novel are controlled by a public narrative voice, an obvious narrative switch occurs in the episode “Lestrygonians”, in which the narrative persona turns from heterogdiegetic to homodiegetic, almost blending with the protagonist Leopold Bloom. That becomes even more obvious in the chapter “Scylla and Charybdis”, marked by a complete substitution of the public narrator with an internal focalizer. As the role of the narrative agent shifts from the diegetic to the mimetic pole, its authority gets restricted and subjected to the textual voice. The process of reading Ulysses thus necessarily comprises both the hermeneutic and the formal plane as the text develops its technical codes and conventions, forcing its own structure upon itself. Our interdisciplinary approach to Joyce’s text employs various methods for quantitative assessment, including syntax analysis, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging and corpus text analysis. The analysis utilizes two computer tools for analyzing corpora – Treetagger and Ngram Statistics Package (NSP) – to emphasize the structural discrepancies, differences in lexical units and lemma usage between various sections of the novel.