Joyce's Ulysses: Social Science, Fiction, and Reality: Ulysses, James Joyce

Abstract

Abstract:What can great fiction do that social sciences cannot? Social science's Individuals are abstract: not real, and thus fictional—shaped to explain outcomes. Explanation concludes a process of inquiry. Fiction, by contrast, is a process of exploration: opening up questions and generating puzzles, pursuing nuance and complexity. Ulysses abundantly exemplifies this. It depicts Dublin life ethnographically but in a distinctive way, as its participants experience it; and the book's hero Leopold Bloom is examined to show how this fictional figure eludes abstraction. Finally, Alfred Schutz's account of the "life-world," viewing individuals as "puppets" and through "typifications" is claimed to support the foregoing argument.