With the release of Ulysses as an eighteen part serial in 1922, James Joyce was lauded as the writer of his generation. The recording of a single day in the lives of two Dubliners--June 16, 1904 was greeted with widespread critical acclaim. T. S. Eliot claiming the book had "the importance of a scientific discovery." Edmund Wilson called him "the great poet of a new phase of human consciousness." James Joyce has been described as a recorder of what is sometimes called "the stream of consciousness", the haphazard progress of reflection, with all its paradoxes, irrelevancies, and abrupt shifts of interest. Joyce made his characters the authors of his work while, as creator of both them and their thoughts, he imposed structure on what, at first, seemed merely random. The storytelling in Ulysses builds themes and motifs gradually, after many years of planning on Joyce's part. In the late 1960s Joyce's writing (both Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake) was central to the formation and consolidation of the principles of deconstruction. The suspension of the linear development of meaning was seized upon by the post structuralists who saw it as a liberating feature of literature. The kind of reading involved in Ulysses is similar to the processes used by hypertext networks, mnemonic structures of assosciation interconnected through an interactive network of nodes, links and anchors. From a post structuralist perspective, this form of non sequential writing is evidence that linearity is only a condition of the technological object of the book, not the act of reading it. The post structuralists view the intertextuality (the constant cross referencing and cross linking of ideas and themes) within the novel as empowering the reader. Thus the use of hypertextual structures within printed works can be traced to the days before computers and HTML.
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