LANGUAGE OF ADVERTISING IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES

Author: CHIFOR MONICA PhD Student

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of language in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

In Ulysses, James Joyce slides from the objective to the subjective, playing with styles, rhetorical formulas, or figurative language through dazzling shifts between rigorous English and slang, mixing registers of the real, imaginary, and symbolical into a new world. The language of advertising is at its best in the 13th episode, Nausicaa. Here, Joyce uses the protagonist, Gerty MacDowell as a rhetorical mask for his intentions of mocking the consumer society of early 20th century Dublin. The character is entrapped in an alienating consumer culture which is supported by Joyce’s linguistic components of the commodity. The language used in Nausicaa bears an intertextual burden, similar to the vocabulary of the advertisements for female consumers.

Keywords: discourse, language, advertisements, makeup, fashion, magazine, consumerist society,

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