Here’s your chance to tackle the single most important novel of the 20th century and the most important prose work of the modernist movement: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce’s novel (or modern epic, if you prefer—a sort of novel to end all novels) is a work of such complexity, mastery, inventiveness, beauty, pathos, and humor that it truly demands and rewards an entire semester’s attention. This class, to be conducted as a small student-centered seminar, will try to place Ulysses within the context of modernism, the epic tradition, Joyce’s autobiography, Irish history, early twentieth-century Irish culture, and the entirety of Western intellectual history. (Honestly—it seems like it’s ALL there in this book!) The course will focus especially on Joyce’s stylistic innovations and the complex layering of patterns and meaning in the text of Ulysses. We will explore Joyce’s engagement with such fields as philosophy, music, theology, politics, history, aesthetics, and psychology, and we will read shorter pieces by T. S. Eliot, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Freud, Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, and others. By the end of the course, you’ll feel like you’ve lived another life in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, and you’ll understand modernism as you could in no other way. Ulysses is a challenging book and hard to tackle on your own, but with a good guide (such as Harry Blamires’s New Bloomsday Book) it is a joy. The idea of a novel so challenging that you need a guide to appreciate it may sound off-putting—but you won’t feel that way once you’ve made it through the text. This is one ride worth the price of admission.
MW, 3:30-4:45pm, face-to-face
Carl Eby
Image of course flyer, which has the same information as the post.
