Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature (368-0-20)
Topic
Reading Ulysses
Instructors
Christine Froula
Meeting Info
University Hall 112: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM
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 the 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; conditions 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, birth, death; desire, the gaze, gender, gesture, dress, and social power; performance and theatricality, both studied and unconscious; 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 burdens, 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. We'll approach this challenging, maddening, amazing, exhilarating, funny, moving, deeply rewarding, often life-changing book in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic; and we'll seek revelation by reading, thinking, and discussing it together with serious purpose and imaginative freedom.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area