Modernism in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to challenge the orthodox view of Modernism as an art dismissive of politics, history and social commitment and as exclusively oriented towards style, technique and cosmopolitanism. By comparing James Joyce’s Ulysses and Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, we aim at redefining European and African Modernism through taking the colonial and postcolonial contexts into account and employing a neo-Marxist critical approach to assess the political implications of the Modernist mode of writing.

By mode of writing we mean the unifying characteristics of a group of works experiencing similar historical and social circumstances; what Roland Barthes calls “écriture”.[1] Traditionally the modernist mode of writing is said to be metaphoric which of course tends to put emphasis on how language is used rather than what it conveys and implies. Hence Western works that are conventionally labeled Modernist have been perceived as dependent on the aesthetics of autonomy and therefore dismissive of historical social and political attachments.