Discourse analysis in Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury

Abstract The literary style of modernist authors like James Joyce (1882-1941) and William Faulkner (1897-1962) is deeply experimental. Their complexity is intertwined with the desire to retell local, national stories as seen through the eyes of losers from which small literary cosmoses are the desires result to re-adapt domestic spaces. This research does not leave a path for the use of language as a transparent means of expression, but at the same time makes it impossible to express fiction through more linear and elaborative methods, leaving the direct elaboration subordinate, shown from the viewpoint of the marginalized, the oppressed. Their speaking variety is conveyed through repetitions, fixations, alienations, and disturbing endings. The two authors create neologisms that signal dissatisfaction with the limitations of conventional language. Joyce includes Hiberno-English in Ulysses (1920) as a means of cacophonous addition to the voices and styles, just as Faulkner includes the African American speech of the American South. They operate on the differences of their traditions. Joyce attacks the use of syntax, being more interested in the order of words within the sentence, the same concern with syntactic structure that we also see in Faulkner.