Saturday, June 15, 2013

Escaping the prison of self …

… A Bloomsday Appreciation of Ulysses by James Joyce, Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever | Cross-Check, Scientific American Blog Network. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Joyce achieved a kind of hyper-realism, rendering the experience of ordinary awareness so faithfully that other depictions seem quaintly artificial, like medieval paintings before artists mastered perspective.
In Saving the Appeances, Owen Barfield notes that the laws of perspective were known to artists long before they were employed by them. His conclusion is that a change in human consciousness took place around the time of the Renaissance, that people began to see the world in greater perspective and that artists began to portray it accordingly. Also, while Leopold Bloom's background was Jewish, he was in fact baptized twice, first as a Protestant, then as a Catholic when he married Molly. 

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