Joyce's Ulysses - 24 Lectures

Dartmouth's Professor James A. W. Heffernan maps the brilliance, passion, humanity, and humor of James Joyce's modern Odyssey in this 24-lecture series. Joyce's great novel Ulysses is a big, richly imagined, and intricately organized book with a huge reputation. T. S. Eliot, bowled over by Joyce's brilliant manipulation of a continuous parallel between ancient myth and modern life, called it "the most important expression which the present age has found ... [one] to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape." Ulysses depicts a world that is as fully conceived and vibrant as anything in Homer or Shakespeare. It has been delighting and puzzling readers since it was first published on Joyce's 40th birthday, February 2, 1922. Enigmas, Puzzles, and Epic Pleasures It is, perhaps, a book whose pleasures you've always wanted to learn to savor but never quite worked yourself up to reading. And who can blame you? After all, Joyce himself famously boasted that "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant!" This is where Professor Heffernan's lectures help. Whether or not you have read this book, you'll find that his lectures, the fruit of decades of distinguished teaching, make an excellent guide to the many-layered pleasures of this modern epic. Illuminating the dramatic and artistic integrity behind the novel's most notoriously challenging passages, he explains why this frank, pathbreaking novel was praised as a landmark and damned as obsceneeven bannedas soon as it first appeared. Professor Heffernan argues that Joyce, for all his waggish gamester's love of masks, mimicry, and literary red herrings, is behind them all the passionate teller of a vitally human tale, "a priest of the eternal imagination" yearning to transmute "the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life."