This essay will analyze the style, genre and plots of the “Hades” episodes found in Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses. Before entering this small treatise, it is important to understand the etymology of the word Hades, since it is the setting for both Joyce and Homer (of course in Homer’s case, he was speaking of the literal aidhs and Joyce was referring to the graveyard, where Bloom attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam and “broods about the death of his only son “). Homer’s use of the word Hades was to refer to the abode of the dead or the unseen nether world; where we find Odysseus searching for Tiresias, to find out how to return to Ithaca safely. The Homeric Hades is not the modern view of Hell, mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. In fact, C.S. says “In real Pagan belief, Hades was hardly worth talking about; a world of shadows, of decay. Homer . . . represents the ghosts [in Hades] as witless. They gibber meaninglessly until some living man gives them sacrificial blood to drink. ”
Comparing the style: Objective vs. Existential
Eight months prior to the first publication of Ulysses , Joyce penned: “If you want to read Ulysses you had better first get or borrow from a library a translation in prose of the Odyssey of Homer. ” Joyce’s recommendation is a must in order to get the full meaning of his work. A good commentary would also be found useful in exegesis. Most people, “. . . opening Ulysses at random are easily scarecrowed away by the first shock of [its] queer mixture of vulgar slang and metaphysical obscurity. ” I must admit that my first reading of Ulysses was horrifying. I am a lover of the western class…
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…oehrich, Rolf. The Secret of Ulysses. (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1969)
Schutte, William, “An Index of Recurrent Elements in Ulysses: “Hades”. James
Joyce Quarterly. Spring 1977: (Vol. XIV, No. 3)
Skeat, Walter. Concise Dictionary of English Etymology. (Great Britain:Wordsword, 1993)
Smith, William. Wordsworth Classical Dictionary. (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1996)
Smith, Paul. A Key to the Ulysses of James Joyce. (New York: Covici Friede, 1934)
Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in Ulysses. (North Carolina: UNC Press, 1968)
The student may wish to begin the paper with the following quote:
“I hold this book [Ulysses] to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape. ”
T.S. Elliot
Dickens’ Hard Times as a Critique of the Educational System
Dickens’ Hard Times as a Critique of the Educational System
Industrialization made Victorian England a brave new world. A world bereft of justice, humanity and emotion. In Hard Times, Dickens critiques this world in several ways; it’s pollution problems, factory accidents, divorce laws, utilitarian ideals, and educational system. The goal of this essay is to focus strictly on Dickens critique of the educational system which was influenced by Industrialization. In his novel, Dickens shows us how children were indoctrinated at very early ages that “facts alone are wanted in life” (47). “The Gradgrind school in Hard Times was modeled on the so-called Birbeck Schools inaugurated by William Ellis in 1848 to teach principles of political economy to poor children. . . ” (Thomas 52). The children were taught that they were not to do anything or believe anything which is contrary to fact. The “Gradgrindian educational project is based on . . . Enlightenment intuitions” (Wainwright 179); wherein, all knowledge must be verified by science. Teachers even went so far to say that: “Taste, is only another name for Fact” (51). In Hard Times, Dickens “attacks [this] education built on statistics, figures and facts . . .” (Taine 33). Dickens criticizes the Victorian educational system because it dehumanized the children, killed fancy, and destroyed the importance of emotion.
The Victorian educational system dehumanized the children by treating them like mathematical figures. It sought to turn them all into little utilitarian robots who were only interested in facts. As the children enter the class, they are described as “little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of fac…
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Mutual Friend. Ed. Norman Page. New York: Macmillan Press, 1979.
Thomas, Deborah. Hard Times: A Fable of Fragmentation and Wholeness. New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1997.
Wainwright, Valerie. “On Goods, Virtues, and Hard Times.” Dickens Studies Annual,
Vol. 26. Ed. Friedman, Guiliano, and Timko. New York: AMS Press, 1998.
The student may wish to begin the paper with the quote below:
“I am going, next month, to publish in one volume a story now coming out in Household Words, called Hard Times. I have constructed it patiently, with a view to its publication altogether in a compact cheap form. It contains what I do devoutly hope will shake some people in a terrible mistake of the days, when so presented” (Guiliano 893).
Charles Dickens in a letter to Thomas Carlyle, July 13, 1854