Timeless Joyce: A Hundred Years of Ulysses

«In Timeless Joyce, Asun López-Varela offers a holistic, dense, and substantial approach to the study of Ulysses, in commemoration of its publication centenary. The author manages to tackle multiple perspectives that pivot around key aspects of Joyce’s narrative by structuring her account around the spiral figure. This brilliant design makes it possible to include not only detailed thematic studies, but also to recurrently return to the main research lines proposed, in an easy, smooth, and natural way. Especially relevant are the myth cells revisited, with a perceptive method that allows transcendental appreciation without forgetting the language puns, the metaphysical substratum, and the Joycean ironic groundwork.» (Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz, President of the James Joyce Association of Spain) «López-Varela’s volume deserves attention not only for the accumulation of new analytical threads but also for the inspiring spiral framework that shows Joyce’s ironic deflective response to the grandiloquent inflation of epic, traditionally performed by myth. The author superbly shows the ambiguities present in Joyce’s mythical method, where the spatial and temporal restrictions proper of the vicissitudes of everyday life are simultaneously parodied and given transcendental scope.» (José Manuel Losada Goya, President of Asteria, Internacional Association of Mythcriticism) 2022 marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. This book is a celebration of Joyce’s text and of the aspects that make his masterpiece timeless. Structured under the inspiration of Brancusi’s spiral image, «Symbol of James Joyce», the volume shows Joyce’s play in two movements: a centripetal move towards unity, using myth, analogies and correspondences and a centrifugal force, with a cunning mixture of irony and unanticipated turns, where the dream of unity is shattered and the text resonates in multiple directions, manifesting its diversity through forms of duplicity and double coding. The double spiral movement of Joyce’s novel is aimed at contrasting diverse perspectives on existential issues as well as religious, political and even gender aspects. Features such as Joyce’s mytho-poetics, the future of nostalgia, temporal becoming, coincidentia oppositorum, apophatic theology and philosophies of the occult are explored as part of an allegorical dimension of myth that simultaneously seeks and refuses holistic unity. Readers are involved in a sort of rite of passage, like Odysseus in his perilous journey, forced to read forwards, backwards and vertically in the fractal structure of the novel through which Joyce achieves its poetics of infinity.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Centripetal – The Mythical Method – Giambattista Vico and the Mytho-Poetic Episteme – Giambattista Vico and the Mytho-Poetic Episteme – Nostos and the Future of Nostalgia – The Philosophy of Temporal Becoming: Stream-of-Consciousness and Beyond – Centrifugal – Joyce, the Craftsman – Irony and Parody – Coincidentia oppositorum – Dissimilar Similarities – Obscurum per obscurius: Philosophies of the Occult in Ulysses – Apophatic Theology and What Joyce Read at the Marsh’s Library – Ulysses: A Universe of Correspondences – The Motifs of Katabasis and Nekyia across «Proteus», «Hades» and «Circe» – Signs on a White Field: From «Proteus» to «Lestrygonians» – Lessing’s Nacheinander and Nebeneinander – Between Scylla and Charybdis – Reading Backwards: Inquiries into Bloom’s Jewishness and Forms of Double-Coding – Reading Vertically: Sonic and Cosmic Correspondences – Penelope: The Centre of the Spiral – Penelope: The Centre of the Spiral – Closing.

About the Author :
Asun López-Varela Azcárate is Professor at the Department of English Studies, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her research interests are Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, as well as Cognitive and Intermedial Semiotics. Since 2007, she coordinates of the research program Studies on Intermediality and Intercultural Mediation SIIM. A proactive member of the profession, currently, López-Varela is Vice-Chair at European Commission Unit REA.A2, Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Postdoctoral Fellowships, Social Sciences and Humanities (SOC). She is also coordinator at New Directions in the Humanities network. In order to strengthen relations between Europe and Asia, López-Varela coordinates an annual Seminar Series on Cross-cultural dialogue and Sustainability funded by the Eurasia Foundation. She is editor and a member of the scientific committee of various academic journals. For more information on her pursuits and publications, please see and .