THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (1)

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture, free in its entirety, is the third in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. Its topic is the first three chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses: “Telemachus,” “Nestor,” and “Proteus.” I first make some general remarks about the novel’s context, its structure and form, and its textual history. I also discuss the nature of the book’s notorious difficulty. I summarize the first three chapters for first-time readers and then closely examine select passages. Themes raised in “Telemachus” include Stephen’s mourning for his mother and search for paternity, his sense of himself as a servant to three masters (the British Empire, the Catholic Church, and Irish nationalism), and his complex revision of Irish nationalist myth in the figure of the Shan Van Vocht; I also consider the formal interplay between stream-of-consciousness and more conventional narrative prose. In “Nestor” I dwell on history as nightmare and the affinity Stephen perceives between the Irish and the Jews as a usurped and oppressed people. In “Proteus,” with its much more thoroughgoing stream-of-consciousness narration, I consider the war in Stephen’s mind between Plato and Aristotle, idealism and empiricism, Romanticism and realism, and their synthesis in the very form of this novel; I further investigate Stephen’s relations—filial, sexual, and amicable—with men and women; and I pause to remark on the unparalleled beauty and significance of Joyce’s language. This episode is the only free one in the Joyce sequence. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of this summer’s tour through the most consequential novel of the 20th century, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, a forthcoming sequence on Middlemarch, and the fall focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:

James Joyce's Ulysses (1): Signatures of All Things I Am Here to Read

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