Mondays 9:30 – 11:30 AM
January 10 through February 28, 2005
Kendal at Hanover
James Joyce's massive Ulysses is usually considered the most important novel written in English in the twentieth century. In technique it is brilliant in many different ways; in content it is tender, bawdy, irreverent, and indefatigably rational. Its hero, Leopold Bloom (the modern Ulysses), is probably the most fully realized character in fiction. But Ulysses is difficult for readers unacquainted with Joyce's tricks or with the work's precise parallels to Homer's epic. Thus it is best to read the book aided by a teacher's guidance. We will be introduced to the tricks, will re-read Homer, and will start with Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, since Ulysses is its sequel. The class will enjoy ample discussion, hear some lecturing, and receive lots of reading notes to assuage the difficulties.
Class is limited to 25 participants.
PETER BIEN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Dartmouth College, where he taught Ulysses and other modern classics for over thirty years. Educated at Harvard, Haverford, Columbia, and Bristol (England), he was honored by the Danforth Foundation with its E. Harris Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching. His publications concentrate on modern Greek literature, which is not irrelevant to Joyce's Ulysses - a"Greek book," after all, first published in a blue and white jacket (the colors of the Greek flag).
