Osteen, Mark. The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet. 1st ed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1995. Print.

The Economy of Ulysses employs Joyce’s personal biography to draw conclusions about the way money operates within Ulysses, specifically how Joyce’s upbringing and life contributed to certain representations of exchange within Ulysses. “He retained the self-image of a gentleman and the Victorian attitude that a Gentleman do not work but coupled it with an inability to hold on to the jobs or money that might actually have permitted such gentility” (7).  First, Osteen fixes many of the prominent aspects of Ulysses critiques within an economic framework by evaluating language, plot, and psychoanalysis with an eye to “Exchange”, reciprocity, and currency. Every element within the novel can be distinguished as an “asset” belonging to some pertinent party and so an “economy” is established in which certain characters incur debt or earn some value from every exchange within the novel. Osteen then interprets every chapter through this viewpoint, and maintains an active count of who benefits (always noting their ethnicity and class in comparison with Joyce’s experiences) asserting throughout the novel that these transactions reveal underlying power structures in Ulysses and can reveal individual character’s communal power relative to others. In this manner, he tallies “the economy of souls”, differentiates Irish, English, and Jewish economic habits, discusses an economy of language, an economy of errors, and the pertinence of gambling/prostitution within the context of these larger economies, although Osteen clarifies that not every interaction in the novel perfectly fits his theoretical lens.

References:

Ellmann, Richard. Selected Letters of James Joyce. London: Viking, 1966. Print.

Joyce, James. Finegans Wake. 1st ed. Vol. 3. New York: Viking, 1953. Print.

Obsession and Themes:

Consumption and Spending

Numbers and Numerology

Religion

Sexualities

Creation and Making