Exploring Joyce's Ulysses

This subject explores the greatest and most influential literary work of art of the twentieth-century: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Through seminars and class discussion, we will embark on a close reading of the eighteen episodes of the novel, each of which has a distinctive style, structure and form. The subject will highlight the humour of the novel, its use of parody and play, as well as its celebrated deployment of stream-of-consciousness technique. It will assess Joyce’s rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey , as part of its ‘mythic method’, and how its elaborate textual and literary architecture tells one day in the life of a Jewish Dubliner more exhaustively and intimately than any other act of literary expression.