A tale of two Homers (and one James): Ulyssean loops from literature to popular culture, and back

In this paper, I aim to explore the survival, recirculation and revitalization of James Joyce’s Ulysses in today’s global popular culture and Italian literary polysystem, through two apparently very different case studies – references to Joyce and Bloomsday in the animated series, The Simpsons, and in the Italian novel Un’Odissea minuta (Di Schüler 2016), respectively. My scope is not to compare the texts themselves with the original Ulysses. Rather, I will try to point out the relevance of such revitalizations in terms of intersemiotic translation, within the conceptual framework of polysystem theory. This perspective might be useful to point out the survival and recirculation of another very Ulyssean (and modernist at large) trait, the cross-fertilization of popular culture and ‘high’ culture in a potentially infinite loop of reciprocal reference.