James Joyce's Ulysses

Catalog description

Embark on one of the great adventures of an academic career: reading James Joyce’s dazzling, gorgeous, messy novel, Ulysses. The board at the Modern Library (among others) calls it the best novel of the twentieth century, which is a fitting vindication for a novel that was once put on trial in New York (in the 1934 case THE UNITED STATES vs. ONE BOOK CALLED ‘ULYSSES’). Ulysses depicts the ordinary lives of Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus on a single day in Dublin in 1904 (June 16th, Bloomsday, a day celebrated around the world each year with readings, re-enactments, and revelry). Joyce began his novel during the First World War by remaking Homer’s epic of homecoming, the Odyssey, to celebrate the value of the everyday lives of ordinary men and women. We read Ulysses alongside three precursor texts that will help us to better understand it: the Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The course environment demands both serious intellectual engagement and a willingness to think in playful, creative ways.