James Joyce's "Ulysses": Text and Contexts

FAIN: FS-50257-10

Pomona College (Claremont, CA 91711-4434)
Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Project Director: March 2010 to November 2014)
Paul K. Saint-Amour (Co Project Director: March 2011 to November 2014)

A six-week seminar in Ireland for sixteen college and university faculty on the development, contexts, and reception of James Joyce's masterwork, Ulysses.

In this seminar a group of college and university teachers and scholars committed to a fuller understanding of the ways in which Ulysses by James Joyce continues to provoke and challenge us will pursue a systematic exploration of 1) the different modes of critical interpretation that have been developed and deployed to confront the challenges of the novel, and 2) the various uses that have been made of Ulysses within the larger cultural institutions of literary modernism, secondary and higher education, and various forms of high- and popular-culture production. We will explore Ulysses both from 'within' and 'without': as a carefully shaped literary text with continuing scholarly appeal, and also as a text which has enjoyed a complex and intriguing 'public' career.