Rationale

I aim for this project to make a twofold intervention in Joyce studies. First, building upon past mappings and spatial engagements with Ulysses, it will function as tool to aid the interpretation of the novel and to supplement close reading of the text. Second, it will elucidate specific aesthetic features of Ulysses that arguably valorize difference and fragmentation. The novel has been mapped several times before, though these mappings tend to indulge a view of the novel as building a totalizing verisimilitude, indulging in Joyce’s quip that he aimed “to have a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book” (Budgen 69). 

The past mappings, like Clive Hart’s A Topographical Guide to Ulysses, though detailed and useful for the interpretation of the text, pose three main issues: First, it was produced years before postcolonial studies and Irish Studies incited new levels of criticism concerning the novel. Consequently, the discussion of space in A Topographical Guide is almost entirely apolitical. Second, It was composed 40 years ago, and whatever misgivings I have about the Joyce industry, there’s been a lot of research and revelations since then on Joyce’s aesthetic techniques that this does not attend to. Third, the multimodal book is out of print, poorly distributed, and extraordinarily cumbersome.

No map, whether print or digital, has availed itself to street level scale, preferring aerial maps that often occlude more than they elucidate. The novel is obsessed with geopolitical issues that maps are hard pressed to represent aerially: the power relations of street naming (especially in a colonial environment), identity politics inherent in erecting monuments, and the social formations that the urban environment both facilitates and obstructs, to name a few examples. My aim, limited for now in the 507 project, is to attend to this issue with the interpretative apparatus of the Google Earth bubbles—adding sociopolitical and aesthetic information to each ‘pin.’