ABSTRACT
The brief survey of James Joyce's early reception in Europe illustrates the underlying connections between aesthetic theory, modernity and colonialism. By linking Ulysses to the restorative potential of anthropological discourse, T. S. Eliot presents Joyce's novel as an effort to regain for art the mythical value of the mentalite primitive and as a remedy against the 'dissociation of sensibility' that affected the European psyche after World War I. Eliot the 'classicist' considered the 'static' order of Ulysses to be a remedy for the cultural fragmentation of the West, which he surely perceived as an extreme case of 'dissociation of sensibility'. Whereas Eliot lamented the failure 'to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling' associated with the 'dissociation of sensibility', Spanish American intellectuals and artists turned such disparity into a strategy of cultural decolonization. The 'modern' and 'European' characteristics of Joyce's Ulysses were the main concern of Eliot in his well-known 1923 review 'Ulysses, Order and Myth'.
