Hermann Broch und James Joyce: Der Dichter auf dem Weg zum Mythos? (German text, Ireland, Austria)

Hermann Broch and James Joyce are two writers who exemplify modernist literary striving to create a mythical unity in the modern world. James Joyce's Ulysses provided a stimulus to Hermann Broch to develop his theory of the novel in which myth plays a prominent role.; The present thesis attempts to analyse Ulysses with a view to its mythical contents and to examine, with a view to the analysis, whether or not Broch's and Joyce's conceptions of myth coincide. Unity and language are the key to the creation of a myth. In a world which disperses into countless particulars, this seems to be a very difficult task to perform. Traditional means of connecting topics and contents fail to create a unity. That is why Joyce creates his own ‘syntax’ of connecting and combining the pieces of reality which he would like to see unified.