“In all habitable lands and islands explored or unexplored”: Politics and Poetics of Space in Joyce’s Ulysses

The aim of this essay is to explore the politics and poetics of space in Joyce’s Ulysses, starting from a consideration of the conditions of his own personal spatial mobility. These deeply diverge from the exilic kinesis which typified the life of that group of Euro-American early Modernists and Modernists – Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso, to name but a few – whose practice of travel and politics of displacement Caren Kaplan strongly critiqued in Questions of Travel. Joyce’s was a much more syncopated and traumatically international nomadism. He never mistified it in his art as exile, he never portrayed transnational mobility or exilic, situations, he never opted for any form of geographical exoticism; he was instead relentlessly mono-locational in his settings, and in this he is unique among modernists. In spite of this, the practices of movement across space and place and the poetics of mobility are central in the architecture of all his texts.