Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)

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.

While Flannery O'Connor's characters and narrative landscape may share a history with those of other works often labeled "Southern gothic," her heavily judicious narrative voice utilizes the depravity of the South struggling to find its identity as a means to explore her vision of God's mercy and distinguishes her work as satirical criticism. This thesis analyzes her construction of a distinctive satirical narrative voice for Wise Blood, particularly as it deviates from how she initially wrote the first chapters as presented in earlier short stories like "The Train" and "The Peeler." Here, the ways in which O'Connor revises her diction and syntax to create a satirical tone will be examined closely. For the purposes of this paper, satire is defined as a literary work aimed at utilizing irony, hyperbole, or sarcasm to reveal, critique, and correct some moral, ethical, or social phenomenon or situation that the author finds reprehensible.