Ulysses S. Grant

Although Ulysses S. Grant’s contemporaries placed him in the highest position of great Americans along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the twentieth century has seen him fade. His presidency has been almost universally condemned, and he is consistently ranked second to rock bottom Warren G. Harding in polls of historians to rate the presidents. … Read more

James Joyce’s Ulysses

In selecting James Joyce’s Ulysses as the best novel of the twentieth century, Time magazine affirmed Joyce’s lasting legacy in the realm of English literature. James Joyce (1882-1941), the twentieth century Irish novelist, short story writer and poet is a major literary figure of the twentieth-century. Regarded as “the most international of writers in EnglishK[with] … Read more

The figure of Ulysses

In this poem, Tennyson reworks the figure of Ulysses by drawing on the ancient hero of Homer’s Odyssey. Homer’s Ulysses learns from a prophecy that he will take a final sea voyage after killing the suitors of his wife Penelope. Ulysses finds himself restless in Ithaca and driven by “the longing I had to gain … Read more

Comments on Joyce’s Ulysses

Ulysses is a grand work of superscription, the creation of a palimpsest spanning millennia of western thought, from the centuries of oral tradition. Australians confronting their insidious, invisible birthrights: cultural cringe, the “tyranny of distance” exacerbated by the “anxiety of influence”–in sum, a mythos where art, like life, is “elsewhere”– may take tonic from Joyce’s … Read more