What Tiresias Has Missed: Prophecy in James Joyce's Ulysses (thesis)

Abstract

I started the project by attempting to compare and contrast Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The topic that interests me the most is both works in relation to prophecy and Tiresias in Greek mythology. But after a tern, I decided to work on Joyce only. I was curious about the "mythic method" that T. S. Eliot describes in his famous essay, "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" and the function of classical mythology in a modernist work. It seemed to me that myth has the ultimate control over the characters and events in Joyce's book, and that this cosmic connection reveals certain truth about Joyce, Homer, and the world at large. In particular, the power of prophecy transcends time and space, and is largely beyond my comprehension. I hope that through this project, I shall be able to connect a few dots and decipher a few messages that Joyce seems to convey, and understand a little deeper the concept of prophecy within the world of Ulysses. [pages 1 & 2 of preface]