Abstract
This thesis uses a theoretical framework derived from recent research in cognitive science to analyse human action and interaction as portrayed by literary character in Ulysses. Accordingly, it is interested in the narrative devices Joyce uses to realistically construct his protagonist Leopold Bloom. It questions how cognitive science can further illuminate, respond to, and rearticulate both how and why these devices work as they do.
The cognitive approach employed departs from philosophies of Cartesian duality – where the mind is seen as distinct from and yet screened within the body. Instead, it aligns itself with more recent theory on actual minds – theory that suggests minds are externally interwoven in social and material environments.
Informed by recent research in situated cognition, this thesis pays particular attention to the ways a character’s mind is situated in and accomplished by their speech acts and discourse, body and behaviour, environment and material reality. The lens provided by situated cognition magnifies the more common critical conceptions about Bloom to reveal how intricate threads of meaning criss-cross the character in a continuum of the mind as distributed through the social story-world. It demonstrates how thematic threads unfold through objects and characters in ways previous scholarship has not seen. These thematic threads constitute substrata which further disclose the complexity and depth not only of Bloom’s character but also of Ulysses as a whole.