Sensational Joyce

Exploring how Ulysses imitates the human mind at work, connecting close readings to psychological theories of Joyce’s time

In this book, John Gordon uses historically oriented close readings to demonstrate that Ulysses is a book that mimics the workings of the human mind. Gordon highlights James Joyce’s exceptional ability to capture and represent lived experiences, showing how Joyce’s writings display the ways specific minds interact with their environments. Ulysses is portrayed here as having its own evolving consciousness.

Sensational Joyce is the first book on Joyce’s psychology to engage deeply with theorists beyond Freud, Jung, or Lacan. Gordon explains how Joyce used other psychological theories, like William James’s ideas on stimulus and response, Gestalt psychology, John Watson’s behaviorism, and trauma research. The book also includes discussions of phenomena considered experimental at the time, such as telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, and spiritualism. Gordon examines the characters of sensitive intellectual Stephen Dedalus and advertising professional Leopold Bloom, following the book’s centers of consciousness into the visionary, hallucinatory, and prophetic final chapters.

Gordon highlights how Joyce’s unique writing style transforms sensations and stimuli into thoughts and responses. As Ulysses progresses, the sensational—meaning sensory data—becomes sensationalistic. In tracing the contemporary theories of psychology evidenced in the novel, Sensational Joyce presents many new and original interpretations that can be applied to other works by Joyce, especially Finnegans Wake.