Psycho-geographical Discourse in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Psycho-verbal Architecture of Dublin

City, as an active and dynamic organism, a literary mapping of a metropolitan consciousness and a site of culture, is an emblematic space that transforms man’s daily life. Nowadays, cities are not merely more than known geographical borders but they are psycho-verbally mapped. Focusing on James Joyce’s (1882-1941) Dublin, as the manifestation of mental, architectural materials in language in Ulysses (1922), and on Martello Tower, as a historical symbol, this paper determines how Joyce proposes an artistic and aesthetic picture of the city, its official and private places, streets, restaurants, coffeehouses, hospitals, and generally its dwellers’ customs and thoughts. In this sense, by applying Merlin Coverley’s theories, psychogeography and mapping metropolitan geography, the verbal and literary map of Dublin is analysed. Furthermore, the paper indicates how Joyce merges images of individuals, citizens, society and their urban life into psycho-images, and architectural symbols, especially the real architecture of the city based on the experiences of the characters such as Leopold Bloom, Stephen Daedalus, and Molly Bloom. On the one hand, the determinate geography of social classes in Dublin shapes and is shaped by the distribution of housing types and tenures; hence, the architecture of houses, streets, and the psycho-verbal map of those settling in these houses are engaged in a reciprocal and inseparable interaction. On the other hand, the psychogeography of characters, as intellectual and insightful walkers, is investigated while walking or strolling in various streets of Dublin. What Joyce suggests in Ulysses is to reread the exterior, architectural layers of places, particularly Martello Tower, as well as their internal layers including cultural, artistic, and socio-political and mental characteristics of characters through psycho-geographical discourse. This knowledge is resulted from the characters’ walking and waking in Dublin streets. Place, de facto, gives every reader an opportunity to understand not only the history of the city and its culture, but the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, the ways of life and the identity of its inhabitants.