This Post Is Broken: All About My Essay

I originally did not want to write an essay that had anything to do with James Joyce or his most famous work, Ulysses.  At first I wrote a brainstorm post with a bunch of random ideas that never fully developed.  I posted a question on Facebook about the internet taking the place of libraries, magazines, and books.  After seeing all the comments I decided it was not all that interesting of a topic to write about so I turned to the literary work on which I had already written numerous posts, Ulysses.  As I had read the novel I noted its flowery poetic language and remembered something professor Burton had said about Isaiah being written in a poetic format to make it more understandable.  So, I thought, if it can be done for Isaiah, why not Joyce?
So I drew up a few different ideas for thesis statements (some to do with poetry and others not so much) and posted them to get an idea of what people found most interesting.  I really already knew which one I wanted to do.





Still,  I wanted to get input from others on how to fully develop my argument.  I cannot tell how many people I tried to talk with about this book, but all I can say is not many people have read it.  Only my aunt was able to give me advice from the perspective of one who has struggled through its pages as documented here.

One of the big issues I had with my thesis was all the dialogue in Ulysses makes it not sound anything like poetry at times.  I knew I needed to find at least one example of a poem that sounded like it could be written in novel format.  I had read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land previously and recalled being quite confounded by it, but I was pretty sure there was dialgoue within the poem. I revisited with much success and wrote a post about the Waste Land's similarities with Ulysses here.


I also remembered looking at the last episode in Ulysses and thinking, "where in the world are the periods?" I knew that it would be great to argue that this final episode would be so much easier to understand if it was broken up into lines and stanzas.  While I was at it, I examined some of the other generally accepted literary rules Joyce ignores in this post.

My rough draft was a lot shorter than I knew my final would need to be, but I posted it here with the hopes that I would get some inspiration of how to beef up my paragraphs.  In the mean time I looked at some of the online resources available to me as outlined in this post.  Literature online gave me a good quote with which to open my paper and the writing lab gave me the idea to write a counter argument within the paper.  I also used Oxford reference to define modernism and poetry.

After all that I sent my revised paper to my loving mother to check for grammar and coherence.  She is awesome.  Here is a link to my final paper.