James Joyce’s Ulysses is possibly the greatest novel ever written. It is also among the funniest, the most controversial, the wildest and the strangest. It was written by the Irish modernist writer James Joyce, and published in Paris just over 100 years ago by the American bookshop owner Sylvia Beach. Two Americans had already gone to trial for publishing parts of it, and it was banned for years in the US and in Britain. It now tops almost every list of the most important novels. In this seminar we will read it together over the course of the quarter. Its eighteen ‘episodes’ cover a multitude of styles and topics. The book draws on everyone’s knowledge—of music, of languages, of Jewish, Irish, Greek, and many other cultures, of advertising, of walking, of cities, of modern gender, of pubs, of mass media, of hotels, of friends and enemies, of working and sleeping, of passing the time—so it is a great book to read with friends. It centers on the life of three people, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, in one day, the 16th of June 1904, and if you read it all, you will know these people  (who never existed) better than you know anyone else in the world except yourself.

Welcome to Ulysses!