A Rock n Roll Ulysses :: Free Essays Online

A Rock n Roll Ulysses In a letter to Carlo Linati, James Joyce wrote, Each back in Ulysses. . . should not only condition but even create its own technique (Dettmar, from Joyce, 143). Written nearly three decades before long players (phonograph record albums) were to fall upon the marketplace, Ulysses stylistically resembles a pop album (or the other way around). Ulysses was composed of eighteen adventures that created their own technique. The same principle applies to pop albums, which contain recrudesce and straightforward tracks that musically reflect the lyrical content (or parody that content). One album that is as stylistically challenging to the conventions of pop music as Ulysses was to the novel is The Beatles eponymic 1968 album (commonly referred to as The White Album). Albums are generally composed of a group of songs from one recorded group of sessions (anywhere from one day to years) that carry separate narratives within each. Across an entire album, the songs can change singers, styles, points of view ( basic, second and third person voices), and even include songs written by other songwriters. The first album to sell a million copies was Elvis Presleys self-titled debut album in 1956, over a decade after the end of World war II. In both date and concept, the album is a postmodernist invention and artifact. Many theorists assume postmodernism was initiated at the conclusion of World War II, after the debut of the atomic bomb by the United States to the rest of world. Just as the bomb erased one hundred thousand living narratives with one plausibly simulated hot flash of light that was indeed real, postmodernism claims that history and reality are no longer possible, since both have been textualised (Selden and Widdowson, 174). Some of the stylistics of postmodernism include hybridity, non-linearity, the questioning of identity, self-reflexivity, excess, and the telling of the unspeakable. These stylist ic modes, however, are not exclusive to postmodernism, and combinations of some of these styles exist in numerous books written prior the end of the second World War. Notable texts before this period using postmodern techniques include Sternes Tristram Shandy (1767), Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Joyces Ulysses (1922), and Woolfs The Waves (1934).