Wurtz, James F. “Scarce More a Corpse: Famine Memory and Representations of the Gothic in ‘Ulysses.’” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 29, no. 1, 2005, pp. 102–117. www.jstor.org/stable/3831624.

Wurtz begins by describing James Joyce’s impressions of the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan and how Joyce “seized upon” certain elements of the Irish Gothic in Mangan’s work including guilt, sin, and paralysis (105). Gothic elements, especially the figure of the ghost, are shown to “bring together several seemingly disparate strands of inquiry” in Ulysses (115). While Joyce’s modernist use of the Gothic is shown to make several innovative departures from existing traditions, references to Mangan’s ideas and influences continue to return throughout the article. Notably, a topical Mangan poem is used to transition to a discussion of one of the major Gothic threads in Ulysses: the Irish Famine. Among other aspects of the “traumatic history of colonial Ireland,” the memory of the Famine haunts the figures of Ulysses and contributes to the novel’s confused modes of life, death, and dying. Wurtz emphasizes, however, that Joyce complicates this outwards anti-English deployment of the Gothic by also focusing inwards on Ireland, particularly in how Catholicism troubles Stephen’s relationship with his mother’s ghost.

Textmarks

“Good Lord…Undermines the constitution.” (8.41-43)

“Perched on high stools…Hungry man is an angry man.” (8.654-663)

“In a dream, silently, she had come to him…Let me be and let me live!” (1.270-279)

References

“Gothic and Modernism.” Modern Fiction Studies. Fall 2000, Vol. 46, No. 3. (Special themed issue)

McCormack, W.J. “Irish Gothic and After (1820-1945).” Seamus Deane, ed. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol II. Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991. 831-854.

Obsessions & themes

Haunting, food, native/foreign, religion