HUMS 265, Reading Ulysses: Modernist Classic and Postcolonial Epic

An extended reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as modernist and postcolonial epic. Beginning with considerations of the relationship of modern epic and novel, the class will study Joyce’s re-working of Homeric epic in modern Irish, “World Literature,” Western and postcolonial literary contexts. The seminar will engage with the style, narrative form, and symbolic meaning of Joyce’s work and survey some of the critical controversies and interpretative challenges that Ulysses has provoked over the last century.