LIT 5186 Spring 2022 Gontarski

Edith Wharton on Ulysses: “a turgid welter of pornography...& unformed & unimportant drivel. Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation & thought can make a work of art without the cook’s intervening.”

On the other hand:
“I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”—T. S. Eliot
“What is so staggering about Ulysses is the fact that behind a thousand veils nothing lies hidden; that it turns neither toward the mind nor toward the world, but, as cold as the moon looking on from cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being, and decay to pursue its course.”—Carl Jung
“The greatest novel of the 20th century.”—Anthony Burgess
“Ulysses is extraordinarily interesting to those who have patience (and they need it).”—John Middleton Murry
“It is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece.” —Virginia Woolf

We will spend the semester reading and studying James Joyce’s great novel, always ranked high, frequently number 1, on lists of the greatest works of literature in English—ever. ENG 5933 will read Ulysses closely, as a or the nexus of Modernism, against its sources and textual and philosophical intersections, Homer’s The Odyssey, not least among them. We will examine as well some of its intersections with the visual arts, the illustrations by Matisse not least among them. And since February 2nd, Joyce’s birthday, will mark the 100th anniversary of its publication in 1922, we will remain open to the myriad international activities that will mark the occasion.