EGL 305 - Jr. Seminar (Winter): Global Ulysses

Course Units: 1.0

When James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was published in 1922, critics praised it as a text which created new literary forms leading to a radical shift in the understanding of what literature was able to say and do. The advent of Ulysses is considered a watershed moment in the history of Anglophone literature and the novel is often hailed as the most important book of the 20th century. Yet, the text’s publication also created a huge uproar for authors of fiction from around the globe. Joyce’s ambitions to encompass and record, in a single text, all of Irish culture and minute details of the city of Dublin, inspired other authors to search for ways in which their own national culture could be summed up in a single text. In this seminar we will explore authors who have taken up the challenge to write a “Ulysses of their Own,” using the formal experiments of Joyce’s novel as a springboard to reflect on their own national literary traditions in the face of a rapidly changing and unevenly experienced modernity. We will read texts such as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (Germany); Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (Japan); GV Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (India); Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace (Turkey); and Derek Walcott’s Omeros (Saint Lucia). The seminar will introduce students to theoretical concepts integral to the study of Joyce’s novel and its global reception such as multiple modernities, global modernisms, postcolonialism, encyclopedic form, translation and reception theory. Prerequisite(s): One 100-level and two 200-level English courses - Must be completed prior to taking this course. CC: HUL, HUM, WAC-R