Ulysses and the Rhetoric of Cartography

One of the long-standing truisms about Ulysses is that it offers a comprehensive and factually precise geography of Dublin. If the numbers of scholarly guides to "Joyce's Dublin" are any testimony, literary critics have not actively challenged this understanding of the novel. Readers continue to accord Ulysses an epistemological authority akin to that of the map: the novel claims to present a totalizing representation of factual knowledge about a particular "real-world" physical space. Here, Hegglund discusses the rhetoric of cartography in James Joyce's Ulysses.