HENK0391GU English - Free topic 9: James Joyce’s Ulysses

Volume 2016/2017
Content

1922 is an important year for students of Modernist literature, as it saw the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Like Eliot’s poem, Joyce’s novel subverts the expectations of the reader, with its constantly shifting techniques and point of view, its allusiveness to the canonical literature of the past, and its challenge to realist conventions of novelistic place and time: the action of this lengthy novel is played out in one city over the course of one day.  As a Modernist work, it centres on the city, in this case on Dublin, and is the culmination of Joyce’s fictionalising of the city of his youth, as in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; it thus creates a personal mythology of the life no longer lived by the émigré Joyce. As a counter to this, it also contains in Bloom that quintessentially Modern figure, the deracinated Jew.

We will read the novel in its entirety over the course of the semester, at the rate of 50-70 pages per week, discussing and analysing these sections in the light of important secondary literature. Information concerning the books to be used will be available in the autumn of 2016, together with a schedule for the course.

  • Category
  • Hours
  • Lectures
  • 28
  • Preparation
  • 176,75
  • Total
  • 204,75