James Joyce’s Ulysses – John Lurz

. This course will consist of a prolonged and meditative reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, considered by many to be the masterwork of 20th century literature. We will spend 10 weeks on the novel, reading a chapter or two each week in a way that approximates the book's original monthly serial publication in the avant-garde journal The Little Review. At the same time, we will be accessing and comparing the novel's serialization in the Modernist Journals Project in order to consider how this serial reading practice allows the novel, a paean to the everyday detail, to intersect with our own everyday experience. As we steep ourselves in the world of Ulysses, we will enrich our reading with judicious selections of classic and contemporary Joyce criticism as well as Richard Ellman's magisterial biography. In the last week of the course, we will take an initiatory probe into Finnegans Wake, a "book of the night" that Joyce saw as a complement to his attempt to capture the happenings of an entire day. The reading throughout will be challenging but exciting; previous knowledge of Joyce is NOT required. This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement.