It’s not plot driven but experience driven. It’s an Epic written on the head of a pin. The normal subject of the Epic was a years long struggle by nearly super-human heroes with a nation at stake (Homer, Virgil etc), it’s set on one day and involves completely ordinary, everyday people doing ordinary everyday things and finds the heroism in that. Just persisting. And within that moment to moment struggle, Joyce incorporates the vast accumulated cultural legacy of the West which is expressed in both high and low language.
Wow. IF only I had been able to write like that, long ago.
Ok.
I think we have a failure of language here.
The OP's lecture was interesting on the turning point represented by the novels of Jane Austen, and how her work was an unacknowledged but essential forerunner of Ulysses. In some sense, Ulysses and the confessional poetry kicked off by D.H. Lawrence at the dawn of the 20th century were part of the percolating marxist revolution that Joyce touched on in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where he describes university students fascinated by the Red Soviet overthrow trying to induct other Irish Catholic students into their atheist communist cult, which in this century has become a dominant cultural reality throughout the former Christendom.
In an ironic sense, as the "relational" novels of Austen led to the "experiential" novel about quotidian minutiae Ulysses (carrying within it a marxist undertow of post-Truth), Ulysses led not only to dystopian fiction, but also to Seinfeld, "a show about nothing."