James Joyce’s Ulysses and Sigmund Freud - Bloom in Circe Interpreted Through Freud’s Theory on Dreams

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, University of Augsburg (Englische Literaturwissenschaft), course: James Joyce, language: English, abstract: This paper analyses the nighttown episode of Joyce’s Ulysses through the framework of Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of dreams. Setting of from the assumption that Freud’s ground-breaking claims must have found their way into the complex, allusion-laden writing of his contemporary Joyce, it works out elements in the hallucinatory Circe chapter that refer to Freud’s theory on dreams, concentrating specifically on the portrayal of Bloom. After an overview of the central aspects of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the structure of Circe will be introduced, justifying the analogy to dreams and tackling the general problem of applying psychoanalysis to literary criticism. The next chapter will take a closer look at Freud’s idea of regression and enumerate elements that may be considered allusions to this in Circe . Building on this, the final chapter will then be an attempt at a psychoanalytic reading of Bloom, also drawing upon some additional ideas from Freud’s later theories.