The Negativity of Modernist Works of Art – Reading Ulysses with Adorno’s Writings on Aesthetics

Once conceived as something artistically (and hence politically) subversive in undermining outmoded social conventions and endowing meaning and significance to a chaotic era known for its “panorama of futility,” modernist works of art in the age of the postmodern have been canonized and incorporated into class curriculum along with works of other epochs. In daily life, mass culture (or cultural industry) greatly appropriated modernist literary techniques – originally designed for the purpose of overwhelming and stimulating its readers – to the extent that modernism became not only domesticated but also familiarized and thus “conventional.” Set against the prevalent appropriation and domestication of modernist works of art through mass culture, this master thesis aims to retrieve the subversive-ness of modernism that was originally conceived as constitutive of its stringent critique of reality in the hope that modernist literary works of art – James Joyce’s Ulysses, in this case – can still provide us with incentive for thinking otherwise. This thesis, in other words, aims to provide tentative answers to several questions that are of the central concerns of both academies and everyday life: how can we read Ulysses when this modernist masterpiece has been canonized and its subversive potential tamed in the postmodern; why should we still read and cherish this complicated modernist literary work of art when there are something much easier for us to “consume;” and, finally, is Ulysses – set in June 16 1904 and written roughly between 1914 and 1921 – already a relic of the past or still relevant to our life in the twenty-first century and far from Dublin or Paris-Trieste-Zurich? These questions, in effect, are intentionally set to challenge the general acknowledgment that Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel that celebrates and reaffirms the value of everyday life, a reading that provides nothing particularly new to every generation. Instead, as I will argue, Joyce’s Ulysses should be read as a “negative” knowledge of reality, which is rather a polemical interpretative perspective shared by contemporary Western Marxist scholars such as Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti. As my literature review will show, the scholarly efforts of these Western Marxists make Ulysses more relevant to the reader in the twenty-first century, while their argumentations all point to the dialectical aesthetics of Theodor W. Adorno without specific theoretical elaboration of it. The second half of this master thesis, therefore, aims to establish a theoretical framework of reading Ulysses as a dialectically negative knowledge by re-contextualizing modernism and its mythical turn as well as reading its various deployments of myth with Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous Dialectic of Enlightenment. For the purpose of articulating this argument more clearly, I will then provide a closer reading of various pieces of Adorno’s writing on aesthetics, in which the importance of a dialectic between literary form and content is emphasized for literary works of art to remain artistically truthful while an aesthetic affinity between this Frankfurt critical thinker and James Joyce’s Ulysses manifests itself all the more clearer.