Practice question · Multiple choice
The Homeric parallel in Ulysses is described as a structural scaffold rather than a message. What follows from treating a classical myth this way in modernist fiction?
Hints
- Does a building's scaffold determine the domestic life lived inside it?
- Why did Joyce map episodes to Homer if nothing conventionally epic occurs?
Show the answer
C. The myth supplies an organising architecture rather than a moral claim
Why
Treating myth as scaffolding means using it strictly to order massive interior material. Modernists did not invoke Homer to moralise, mock modernity's triviality, or create an allegorical code; the scaffold allows the ordinary day to stand on its own terms.
Practise Ruptures: Proust, Joyce and Woolf
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More questions on Ruptures: Proust, Joyce and Woolf
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