ENGL 2507 Reading Joyce's Ulysses

Course description

A thorough episode-by-episode study of the most influential book of the twentieth century, James Joyce's Ulysses. The key to understanding this complicated work is to read it collectively, navigating together the dazzling and often playful styles Joyce uses throughout the book. The class will emphasize the joy and fun of reading this wonderful work. We will place Ulysses in the context of Joyce's writing career, Irish culture, and literary modernism. We will understand Ulysses as a political novel, including Joyce's response to Yeats and the Celtic Renaissance; Joyce's role in the debate about the direction of Irish politics after Parnell; and, most of all, Joyce's response to British colonial occupation of Ireland. We will also consider Ulysses as an urban novel in which Bloom, the marginalized Jew and outsider, is victim of the alienation created by nativist xenophobia. No previous experience with Joyce is required.

Previously offered classes