Ulin, Julieann V.

The purpose of this thesis will be to examine closely James Joyce’s Ulysses with respect to François Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus. Joyce considered The Adventures of Telemachus to be a source of inspiration for Ulysses, but little scholarship considers this. Joyce’s fixation on the role of teachers and mentor figures in Stephen’s growth and development, serving alternately as cautionary figures, models or adversaries, owes much to Fénelon’s framework for the growth of Telemachus. Close reading of both Joyce’s and Fénelon’s work will illuminate the significance of education and mentorship in Joyce’s construction of Stephen Dedalus. Leopold Bloom and Stephen’s relationship in Joyce’s Ulysses closely mirrors that of Mentor and Telemachus as seen in Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus. Through these numerous parallels, we will see that mentorship serves as a better model for Bloom and Stephen’s relationship in Ulysses than the more critically prevalent father-son model.

This thesis takes a cultural studies approach to representations of post-war U.S.
suburbia in Richard Yates’ 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, as well as in the
contemporary AMC television series Mad Men. These texts explore the postwar time
period, which holds a persistently prominent and idealized space in the collective cultural
imagination of America, despite the fact that it was a period troubled by isolationism,
containment culture, rampant consumerism, and extreme pressure to conform to social
roles. This project disrupts the romantic narrative of postwar America by focusing on the
latent anxiety within the suburban landscape—by interrogating the performative nature of
the planned communities of the 1950s and 1960s and exposing the tensions that were
borne out of the rise of domesticity and consumerism. This project explores the descent
into a society obsessed with consumerism and conformity, and seeks to interrogate the
culture’s false nostalgia for the time period.