Joyce’s Ulysses holds a mirror up to the world in which we live and reflects for us our own puzzling relation to the social and material world. Even today in a modern world, Joyce’s Ulysses remains relevant because Joyce realistically encodes experience. And although modern world technology enables us a very different kind of experience than that (for example) of Joyce’s main character Leopold Bloom, the essence of human nature—our emotions, physiognomy, dispositions, states of mind, motivations and intentions—remain true. Applying real world, real mind research to Joyce’s fictional characters and their embodied encounters in a social and material storyworld furthers investigatory strategies for Ulysses. Understanding how cognitive processes "extend beyond the skin" to crisscross character in a continuum of the mind as distributed through the social storyworld allows us to decode character through establishing new connections.
