Studies in 20th-Century Literature (368-0-23)
Topic
Joyce's 'Ulysses'
Instructors
Christine Froula
Meeting Info
University Hall 112: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
An encyclopedic epic that tracks three Dubliners' criss-crossing adventures on 16 June 1904, James Joyce's landmark Ulysses (1922) captures a day in the life of a semicolonial city in a wealth of analytic--in his word, vivisective--detail. Proposing that Ulysses has much to teach us about how to read our own everyday worlds, we'll study the book's eighteen episodes alongside Homer's Odyssey and other sources, notes, and commentaries. In thinking about the fictional Dubliners who populate Ulysses, we'll consider Joyce's transmutation of Homer's Odyssey into a modern epic quest; Ireland's long colonial history and its struggle to throw off British rule; characters' conflicting dreams of a subject or sovereign Ireland; resonances of home, exile, and homecoming; psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and "the psychopathology of everyday life" (Freud); scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; bodies, sensation, food, peristalsis, hunger, sex; desire, the gaze, gender, gesture, dress, and social power; performance--studied and unconscious--and theatricality; the pain and mourning of loss; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life—and political bite--of jokes, comedy, satire, humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as key to political authority in light of Joyce's reported remark that women's emancipation is "the greatest revolution of our time in the most important relationship there is"; intersubjective dynamics, human and animal, dead and alive; history, time, memory, monuments; the powers and pleasures of language; the play of voices: narrative voice, interior monologue, dialogue, colloquy, reported speech, telling silences, omniscient authority, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation; noises and soundscapes from the cat's "mrkgnao" to a screeching tram and characters' inner, speaking, and singing voices; the worldly diction of Joyce's beyond-English; and more. Together we'll approach this challenging, maddening, amazing, exhilarating, funny, moving, deeply rewarding book in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic, and we'll seek revelation by engaging it with serious purpose and imaginative freedom.
Teaching Method
Impromptu lectures, presentations, discussion.
Evaluation Method
Prompt attendance, preparation, participation (20%); weekly posts (25%; these count as midterm and final); class presentation with 1-2-page handout (15%); course papers and projects: option of two shorter or one longer paper/project) (40%).
Class Materials (Required)
Joyce, Ulysses (Modern Library, 1961 text), Don Gifford with Robert J Seidman, Ulysses Annotated, Homer, The Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald's or another translation. Other recommended and supplementary readings, recordings, and films via Canvas Course Reserves and Library Media.
Class Attributes
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area