چکیده (انگلیسی):

Many modernist novelists invite the literary readers to read, interpret and decode
spatially the writers’ hometowns or Heimat visualized in their literary fictions. In their
act of remapping the cities, the novelists construct themselves and their inner selves.
They represent a set of interconnections and relationships that help themselves and
every individual to construct and reconstruct his/her own national identity. Their
travelling or wandering in the streets of Heimat can be considered as a sort of
negotiation of the familiar spaces. Strolling in the streets of hometown paves the way
for every novelist to encounter diverse aspects of life, and observe different places
which provide enough motifs to formulate and reshape one’s own identity. Home is,
according to Paul de Man, “always also a means of leading to the observation of self”
(9); it can be one source of constructing the national identity and at the same time an
essential reason for the continuity of self. The quest for identity at home is an
interminable attempt that James Joyce portrays in all his works, particularly in Ulysses
(1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). He imagines his Heimat, Dublin, and shows how it
can be treated as a metaphorical map in which his characters begin the exploration of
self or identity. This paper does not use a cartographic method, and it does not portray
a scientific or objective map rather a spatial, subjective and sensational map, through
which Joyce provides an aura of self-knowledge that Heimat/home might be the centre
of the world.