Luca Crispi, Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses. Becoming the Blooms

“We are still learning to be Joyce’s contemporaries, to understand our interpreter.” This is the opening sentence of Richard Ellmann’s biography with which in 1959 (and identically in the revision of 1982) he drew the sum of his engagement with Joyce’s many-faceted life. It has, six decades later, lost neither its truth nor its power. On the contrary: the incentive to such learning has, if anything, intensified. It springs today from a closely-knit material basis witnessing to the very life-f..