‘May I trespass on your valuable space?’: Ulysses on the Coast

This essay moves beyond questions of national identity and symbolic national territory in Ulysses by shifting the focus to the novel's coastal setting. It argues that Joyce strategically employs this setting to expose the economic and political mechanisms that have conspired to postpone Ireland's reciprocal engagement in the European interstate system, resulting, culturally, in a perpetual disruption of what Frantz Fanon called "international consciousness." This essay situates these observations in the context of recent critical arguments about the ways in which the opposing discourses of nationalism and cosmopolitanism obscure the pragmatic challenges of sustainable internationalism and egalitarian statehood in the developing world.