The Revitalization of the City and the Demise of Joyce's Utopian Modern Subject

Abstract

James Joyce provides us in Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, with a representation of an ideal-type subject of modern urbanism that collects and exemplifies the qualities of Simmel's blast cosmopolitan and Benjamin's flâneur, and fashions them into a model for practical life. Bloom is the 'un-created conscience' of modern city life; a prototype modern hero who struggles to negotiate the twin dangers of the metropolis: the obliteration of individual and subjective culture by abstract processes and objective culture in mass society; and excessive egoism, the cult of the individual, identitarianism and social disintegration. Do the conditions of possibility for such utopian modern subjectivities continue to exist in contemporary Dublin?