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June 9, 2008
Rocky Road to Dublin: Reading Joyce's Ulysses
Tim: I've started reading James Joyce's Ulysses, that novel of twists and turns that has sucked many hapless readers into its confounding Charybdis-like whirlpool of intertextuality or driven them to remote islands to spend the rest of their lives munching on lotus leaves and wondering why they ever wanted to read such a long, dense novel. To prevent this, I've armed myself well. I read Homer's Odyssey two years ago, I have the Teaching Company 24 part lecture series on the novel by Dartmouth professor James Heffernan and the book Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford plus I've found some websites that guide the wayfaring reader through the maze of Dublin place name references. I also found a great article that analyzes the snippets and references to Irish folks songs in the novel. (Even now I can hear my wife sniggering at my geekiness and my pretentiousness).
So off I go to the Martello Tower on Dublin Bay.
In other news, Elanor started doing this really funny thing. When we tap our finger repeatedly on her mouth, she sings and it makes the "wa-wa-wa-wa-wa" sound. She even does it herself except that she uses her entire arm instead of just her finger. It's hilarious to watch her! It looks she's having some sort of strange arm spasm, with sound effects.
Literature , Tim | By Tim and Jo | 9:06 AM
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Comments
Impressive. I have read a lot of dense books, but the first chapter of Ulysses convinced me to look elsewhere for literary gratification. You are far stronger a reader than I!
Of course, I see my non-reading of Ulysses as a sort of rebellion against a pompous author that felt comfortable torturing his readers with such ridiculously impenetrable text. Viva La Revolucion!
Posted by: Jonathan at June 11, 2008 8:54 AM
Nabokov did an excellent analysis on Ulysses in his "Lectures on Literature", dunno if that made it into your annotated version.
Posted by: tracykw at June 16, 2008 7:19 PM