Bloom in the Distracting and Rationalizing Metropolis: Appropriation of the Urban Space in James Joyce`s Ulysses Part II = Bloom in the Distracting and Rationalizing Metropolis: Appropriation of the Urban Space in James Joyce`s Ulysses Part II

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper examines the urban experience of Leopold Bloom, the urban peripatetic hero of James Joyce`s Ulysses and qualifies his experience as one of the representative modes of experience in the European metropolises at the turn of the twentieth century. Turn-of-the-century European metropolises were characterized by distractions emanating from exponentially increasing population, commodities and information. On the other hand, the same urban space was also highly rationalized. Rationalization schemes such as urban planning and census taking were executed to organize the distracting urban chaos. The Irish capital city of Dublin, the geographic setting of Joyce`s novel, was also under the influence of distraction and rationalization. Situated within this context, Joyce`s hero Bloom represents an exemplary metropolitan type who experiences and copes with the distracting and rationalizing forces of metropolitan Dublin on a very individual level. Distracted and rationalized in the urban space of the city, Bloom is occasionally fragmented and mechanized. However, he appropriates the distractions of the rationalizing urban space to create moments of meaningful experience. These meaningful moments, connected to and mixed with his cherished memories of the past, are the driving forces that enable Bloom to preserve his self-coherence.