A Rock n' Roll Ulysses

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A Rock n' Roll Ulysses

In a letter to Carlo Linati, James Joyce wrote, "Each adventure [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 invade 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 separate and distinct 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' eponymous 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 (first, second and third person voices), and even include songs written by other songwriters. The first album to sell a million copies was Elvis Presley's 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 postmodern invention and artifact.

Many theorists assume postmodernism was initiated at the conclusion of World War II, after the introduction 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 fictive 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 stylistic 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 Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1767), Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Joyce's Ulysses (1922), and Woolf's The Waves (1934).

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