Paper topic

I have been reading a lot of modernist literature this semester, and looking at Ulysses through the lens of context, particularly in search of a paper topic. One thing that has been an extremely prominent theme in most of what I've been reading is the role of family in modernist texts. Often families are featured in these texts as extremely dysfunctional, broken, or decaying tableaus of what the "family" has been idealized as in modern culture. However in everything I've read which features families like this there is something beautifully triumphant about them by the end. The family is greater than the sum of it's parts. I guess though what I particularly like about these families is that they don't seem to survive in spite of the fact that they appear to be broken, grotesque or perverted, but rather, because of it. In a strange way at least. All this is a very long winded way of proposing that the role of the family and its power beyond the individual human spirit's is very important in Ulysses. Of course not having finished it, (I think it ends well, right?) and the argument depends pretty heavily on the outcome of the narrative, but I was thinking of writing about Milly and Leopolds relationship, as well as Molly and his. I feel like there might be more to get into, however Stephens family certainly does not serve to prove my point. Can anybody think of other examples from the text up to this point which demonstrate the salvation of Bloom through his family? Slash, does anyone severely disagree with me. Feedback would be extremely appreciated and helpful.

Designed Distraction

In a film class we recently discussed a technique which some filmmakers use (the point of which I'm still not sure) which deliberately does not keep the viewers attention. Fassbinder used this technique in many ways to challenge the attention spans of the viewers of his films. Reading 20 pages of Ulysses took me two hours today and it often wasn't because I didn't understand subject matter, but because I found it very easy to get caught up in my own thoughts. I know this isn't a very analytic post, but it is something I'm curious about, because it's very possible that this is just my own fault, but if it's not, then it has to be deliberate on Joyce's part, in which case, I'm very curious about his motives. What benefit do we get from being in our heads just as much as Leopold's?

Leopold Bloom- Id, Ego, Etc.

So far Leopold Bloom seems to be a really interesting amalgam of the id and the ego. In Waiting for Godot you have obvious character distinctions, so Estragon gets hungry or complains about his feet (things based very much in the physical) while Vladimir's actions and character are based very much in the realm of the intellectual. Each one serves as paradigm a psychological construct. And while it is of course normal for an individual to have traits from both the id and the ego, Leopold Bloom is unique because he seems to be a written as a paradigm of both. He obsesses over food (kidney, sausages, bread and butter, etc.), dotes on a the body female neighbor of his whom he runs into and in the end fully enjoys his bowel movements. Yet he is proved to be an intellectual to some extent with regards to the metapsychosis and a few other moments of intellect in the drivers seat. I'm not sure what question I have that arises from this observation but it will be interesting to see how this plays out through the rest of the novel.

Afterthought:
Am I misreading the amalgam/ does Dedalus stand as the intellectual foil to the physical Leopold? or does Leopold's duality ring true anyway?