JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES (4 Week Course)
Course Introduction
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is the most riotous, humane, encyclopaedic, stylistically brilliant and wickedly funny literary work of the twentieth century. And if this verges too much on protest, little argument is needed to maintain at least that no other book stands so preeminently over 20C literature. In 1941, twenty years after its publication, Harry Levin declared Ulysses ‘a novel to end all novels.’ T.S. Eliot hailed the work as a major step toward 'making the modern world possible for art.’ And Virginia Woolf, though not enamoured with the book's ‘indecency’, confessed to having read it ‘with spasms of wonder.’ More widely still, Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez all claimed to be beneficiaries of Joyce and Ulysses.
Course Overview
In this 4-week course we will read four key chapters of Ulysses, along with selections from the rest of the text. Our classes will be structured around discussion of the guided reading questions, provided to you one week in advance. We will cover all of the above in close detail, along with the following key topics:
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Joyce's Dublin: British Rule in Ireland at the turn of 20C and the movement for Independence
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Joyce's Uses of Homer and the Epic Tradition
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Ulysses, Order and Myth
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Leopold Bloom and the Lotus Eaters
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Anti-semitism and the Subaltern
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James Joyce and the Modernist Novel
