ENGL 6700 - Joyce’s Ulysses

(crosslisted)
(also COML 6435)

Spring. 4 credits.

D. Schwarz.

A thorough episode-by-episode study of the art and meaning of Joyce’s Ulysses. We will explore how Ulysses redefines the concepts of epic and hero and how Joyce’s masterwork reflects literary modernism. We shall discuss how Ulysses raises major issues about the city, colonialism, and popular culture, and dramatizes what it means for the central character to be a Jew and an outsider in Dublin. We shall address Ulysses as a political novel, specifically, Joyce’s response to Yeats and the Celtic Renaissance. We shall also investigate the relationship between Ulysses and the other experiments in modernism, especially painting and sculpture. We will also examine Ulysses in the context of major issues in literary study and test various critical and scholarly approaches.