Time and Modernism: a Critical Analysis of the Perception of Time in Ulysses and the Sound and the Fury
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This study aimed to explore the concept of time as presented by writers of the Modernist movement, focusing on an analysis of two modernist literary works- James Joyce’s Ulysses and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. These two authors introduced innovative literary techniques in their works, stressing the experience of time in a chaotic world. Both Joyce and Faulkner imbued their literary characters with a sense of Bergson’s and Einstein’s throughts on duration, where fantasy, memories, and various physical sensations of the human body find shelter in the present, at times narrowing and at other times expanding. The characters in Ulysses are in search of a mental solution to the experience of time. The present is a lost time and the past is a lost paradise, while the future is a search for a lost paradise. However in The Sound and the Fury, the characters’ language is based on irregular associations and memories, moving from a spatial sense of time to chronological alignment. The souls of the individual characters are haunted by the passing of time. Faulkner organizes a spatial disorder in The Sound and the Fury. In this study, through a qualitative analysis, involving the use of narratology, the psychoanalytic literary criticism of Bergson and Einstein, and textual analysis, it was possible to convey the divergent modes of the modernist use of time. This analysis showed how Joyce and Faulkner employed time as a means of bringing order to the chaotic nature of modern life.
Source: Folia linguistica et litteraria
Author: Dalila Karakaҫi
Institution: University of Shkodra "Luigj Gurakuqi"
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4410125927