ABSTRACT
Woolsey took the advice and pursued a study that would situate modernist currents against the backdrop of naturalistic narratives which did not similarly offer a study of the human mind. Woolsey's sensitivity to the domain of the subconscious was cast in terms that typify the intellectual preoccupation, between 1890 and 1930, with primary processes and the unconscious. Woolsey's decision went beyond the parameters of legal opinion and invoked the modernist movement when he so graphically described James Joyce's technique. Woolsey warned that the reading of Ulysses might in places have an emetic effect, but nowhere, he concluded, does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. When he admitted Ulysses into the United States, he also acknowledged "a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind". The use of history in Joyce's work is a reflection of the period's preoccupation with temporal consciousness, especially in its evolutionary form.
