Joycean Form, Emotion, and Contemporary Modernism: Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and McCarthy’s The Making of Incarnation

Five types of emotional engagement with fiction may be identified in relation to the formal innovations of modernist novels. Two recent novels that owe their stylistic distinctiveness in part to the heritage of Joyce’s Ulysses draw on these possibilities in very different ways: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and Tom McCarthy’s The Making of Incarnation. The former inventively develops the style of the “Penelope” episode at great length, inviting the reader to share the protagonist’s dismay at several features of contemporary American culture, while the latter may be seen as the heir of the “Ithaca” episode, evoking an emotional response by indirect means rather than through a direct appeal.