David R. Sherman, Associate Professor of English at Brandeis, will lead a course on Joyce’s Ulysses this summer.
Session I: June 1 to July 3, 2020
Days: M, T, W, Th
Time: 11:10am – 1:10pm
Credit Hours: 4 Credits
Brandeis Graduation Requirement Fulfilled: WI, HUM
This seminar is an opportunity to become absorbed in Joyce’s Ulysses as a member of an interpretive community. Published in 1922, this novel has impacted modern literature like no other. A novel at the edge of the genre of the novel, Ulysses is a highly experimental, weirdly delightful, and encyclopedic world-making project.
This class will explore the novel chapter by chapter, with parallel readings of Homer and other intertexts. This course will also consider the place of Ulysses in modernism: the explosive cultural project across the arts in the early 20th century that is still with us.
As a four-credit course, it is based on the expectation that students will work for at least three hours outside of class for every class contact hour (doing assigned readings, research, papers and projects, and so on). The learning goals for this course include:
- developing the ability to closely read and re-read complex texts and to make nuanced
descriptions of their stylistic patterns, structural principles, rhetorical techniques and
other aspects of their aesthetic force and signifying effects; - developing skills with analytic and interpretive writing, through feedback and revision
researching and presenting information about scholarly debates around Ulysses
mapping Ulysses in relation to other modernist cultural movements; - designing creative or non-academic responses to Ulysses, in various media and genres
Our intensive, collaborative approach to Ulysses will serve different needs for each student, based on individual academic and creative commitments – view the full course syllabus here
