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William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and James Joyce’s Ulysses

This paper tries to study the city aesthetics in William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and James Joyce’s Ulysses through modern flâneurs. Modernism was originally an art of cities and has generally been defined as metropolitan or cosmopolitan art. Such a definition has generated an idea that Modernist works tend to be ahistorical. But Paterson and Ulysses show somewhat different characteristics. Both Williams and Joyce choose a city which they are familiar with as their spacial background. Even though the city of Paterson is not as big and developed as New York, it has a unique history which can represent the typical history of America. Dublin also has the history of colonialization and repression from Britain. Paterson and Bloom walk or wander through the streets of their cities and read the complex history in their everyday incidents. Here, Paterson and Bloom―each the protagonist of both texts―appear as re-created characters of modern flâneurs. Through “walking” as an artistic practice, they interpret, or sometimes recover, the complex layers of history and respond to the modernity underlying their city space. In that process, both protagonists show a patient and generous mind towards “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent,” which cannot be controlled well but represent the modernity itself.