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Reading Ulysses as a Journal Kiheon Nam (Seoul National University of Science and Technology) Joyce's setting of the clock of Ulysses on June, 16, 1904, has raised a lot of suspicion about his lack of history and surmises about any special significance of that day. Of the two different perspectives on history, the “historiographical” is preferred in this approach to Ulysses, since the “historicist” valorizes grand narratives of historic significance, which means the exclusion of petit récits. By adopting a journal form, Joyce strategically blurs the complacent distinctions between private and public, history and journal. Many critics have attempted to contextualize the date, June 16, 1904, but no plausible, satisfying answer has ever been given. I argue that this dissatisfaction must be readdressed in terms of Joyce's interest in journalism and popular culture. Long before the “Aeolus” episode, whose location is the newspaper office, and whose page format is similar to newspapers, Joyce has employed a personal journal at the end of A Portrait. The itemization of experience is similar to interior monologue technique, in that it adopts the Bergsonian concept of durée, a psychological concept of time. So Joyce's organizing of Ulysses as a journal is a strategy to incorporate encyclopedic desire into a limited form. As a result, many anachronic references were pointed out by many critics, some of whom blame Joyce's Ulysses for being an ahistoric, apolitical text. But Joyce questions the linearity of historical narrative by deploying many historical events in a fragmented, synchronic way. Joyce must have used some anachronic references to the effect that the complacent juxtaposition between unrelated, conflicting discourses is questioned. Joyce's use of a journal form articulates his preoccupation with history. In “Nestor,” Stephen's retort to Mr. Deasy's remark of teleological historicism encapsulates Joyce's critique of the unilinear, monocausal concept of historical progressism. Joyce's yoked condensation of many concepts of time - diachronic, synchronic, transchronic, etc. - blurs our sense of history as telos, like Mr. Deasy's goal. Instead, Joyce embraces the trivial events, fragments of history in a journal, thus incessantly interrogating the history as the victor's recordings. Joyce must have resisted the justification of the British domination over Ireland as a historical “fact.”