"The Countless Unmurmering Dead": Echoing Voices in Ovid's Metamorphoses and James Joyce's Dubliners

Abstract

The modern poet Rainer Maria Rilke speaks to the conflict between the need for community and the desire for solitude. For many modern people in Rilke's Europe, the ability to thrive with the support of community existed in tension with the drive to face the world alone. Rilke adopted Greek and Roman myths to reflect the sentiments of his culture, such as the lament for the past expressed in his 'Sonnets to Orpheus'. I use excerpts from Rainer Maria Rilke's writings as epitaphs for my analyses of Ovid and Joyce's works. Rilke was a contemporary of Joyce, also a self-exile from his native land, who drew greatly upon the classics in his search for the extraordinary in everyday life. I have been reading Rilke for as long as I have been reading Ovid and Joyce. In this thesis I have drawn upon his words to help me frame the questions about the role of fate and the divine, and whether ordinary people can break free from cultural constraints.