'Non descript Specimens': Herbert Spencer's Social Theory in "Ulysses"
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Kevin Hart [1]
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[1] Fulbright University, Vietnam
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- Localización: James Joyce quarterly, ISSN 0021-4183, Vol. 57, Nº. 3-4, 2020, págs. 319-335
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
This essay examines Ulysses's engagements with Herbert Spencer's synthetic philosophy and theory of social evolution. The study's approach is two-pronged. First, it reads Arthur Conan Doyle's Stark Munro Letters as a source of Spencer's ideas in Ulysses and as an instructive parallel to Joyce's parody of Spencer. Second, it reads the manifold parodies of Spencer in Ulysses. In all, the essay argues that in the view of Ulysses Spencer's theories are too loosely conceived and too easily assimilated into conflicting schools of thought. In particular, "Eumaeus" ridicules Victorian social research and progressive reform for its Spencer-like conviction that the poor retain the qualities of an earlier stage of evolution. The study ends with a reading of Spencer's writings on style and with an analysis of the allusions to those writings in "Eumaeus," where the narrator's strategic stylistic gaffes associate Spencer with errors in thought deriving from misunderstandings of language. In this manner, Ulysses challenges the sciences' claims to objective empiricism. In Ulysses, scientific knowledge is distorted by, adapted to, and understood in terms of the discourses surrounding it.
