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Ulysses

“There are two kinds of people,” declared a contributor to The Economist, “Those that have read Ulysses, and those that haven’t.”  Since its scandalous publication in 1922, James Joyce’s epic novel, structured around Homer’s Odyssey, has been variously the subject of ground breaking censorship trials, lauded as one of the greatest masterpieces of English literature, condemned as an impossibly difficult novel to read, mocked as a ludicrously overwrought story of a day in the life of its rather ordinary protagonist Leopold Bloom, illustrated by artistic luminaries such as Henri Matisse, made sexy by Eve Arnold’s 1955 photographs of Marilyn Monroe reading the book in a playground, and inspired countless pilgrimages to Dublin and pub crawls through the city.  Named by British actor Stephen Fry as his favourite book, Ulysses, Fry says, is not only a great work of comedy, but it is “the most affirmative book”; “you’ll be astonished by how beautiful it is, and it’s a book like no other that you can return to again and again and again and again.”  As the writer in The Economist asserted, the novel’s “patient readers are marked for life by having read it.”  Without necessarily promising a life-altering experience, our journey through Joyce’s often dark and dingy Dublin and irrepressibly sympathetic exploration of human nature – pimples, warts and all -- will begin with an introduction to Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and will provide opportunity to develop close reading and critical interpretation skills.