INTRODUCTION

From radically differing perspectives the modernist writers, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, both undertook a comprehensive critique of the late Victorian modernizing assumptions behind Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. Joyce's Ulysses (1922) includes a cluster of ‘Hebraic and Hellenic’ representations and employs them to explode any notions that an Arnoldian grand synthesis of these oppositions is equivalent to the progress of civilization. The modernist techniques at the heart of Joyce's novel constructs an indeterminate ‘Jewgreek’ – Leopold Bloom, a modern-day Odysseus – who cannot be ‘known’, unproblematically, by any received set of criteria. In this way, Joyce makes him the site on which to challenge the reader's faith in a literary text to order ‘reality’. It is precisely the instability of ‘the Jew’ as a racial and cultural signifier that Joyce, throughout his novel, exploits to undermine any dominant discourse whether it be religion, nationalism, or Arnoldian liberalism.