James Joyce
James Joyce is widely considered the most important writer of the 20th century: the history of the novel has even been divided up into Before and After Joyce. His masterpiece is Ulysses but Ulysses is not just the most famous novel of its time, it is also the ‘most frequently started but unfinished’ novel probably of all times. This course will give you the context and community not just to finish Ulysses but also to enjoy it, because it is one of the funniest books ever written and—once past some difficulties—one of the most enjoyable.
Ulysses can’t be understood without reading two earlier books by Joyce, his ground-breaking collection of short stories Dubliners and his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, so we will begin with these before concentrating on the ‘big book’ for most of the semester.
The course will be online and will be run seminar-style: we will explore these books together and the focus will be on discussion. The written work for the course will be a short paper on A Portrait and then a longer end-of-semester paper.