EGL 260 - James Joyce

Course Units: 1.0

(Not Offered this Academic Year) This course will focus entirely on Irish writer James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses, published in 1922. This is a complex, challenging and experimental novel (900 pages), which uses stream of consciousness as its primary literary mode. Set on just one day, June 16th 1904, it tells the story of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom as we learn of their pasts, presents and hopes for the future. Joyce’s novel is a meditation on the lives of these characters, and the modern colonial Dublin they inhabit, however it is also a self-reflective piece of literature which foregrounds issues relating to language, style, and storytelling. In the course, we will successively read all of the chapters of Ulysses, analyzing it through a variety of critical paradigms, including post-colonialism, modernism, and feminism. We will also watch a number of films relating to Joyce and his work, such as Nora, Bloom, and Ulysses, and at the end of the course we will consider the commodification of Joyce as the ‘Great Irish Writer’ through the yearly Bloomsday celebrations of June 16th in Dublin. Students are encouraged to read Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before the class begins. Prerequisite(s): One 100-level English course or a score of 5 on the AP English Language or Literature and Composition test. CC: HUL, HUM