Music, Intermediality, and Shock in Ulysses

This essay studies intermedial compo sitional practice in Ulysses, a text that extends musical reference and the phono-icon to reconfigure textual articulations of knowledge, sociality, and emotion. In Ulysses, music with its formal quali ties serves as a complex marker of affective surge and withdrawal, energy, and fatigue. Its production of consciousness as an “individuating rhythm” allows characters to admit music as an exemplary praxis especially able to hold attention, inform reality, and contain affect.