Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is the seventh in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes 13 through 15 of Joyce’s Ulysses. First, I consider Ulysses as less a book than a sequence of experimental short stories and novellas; then I recapitulate the argument that the style of the novel becomes more autonomous as it goes on, its form swallowing its content. Next we turn to the “Nausicaa” chapter, which first attracted the book’s proscription by American authorities; I explain Joyce’s proto-feminist mockery of women’s domestic sentimental fiction and his portrayal of Bloom’s masturbatory sexuality. Then we investigate the comparison made between the gestation of a fetus and the development of the English language in “Oxen of the Sun” with its panoply of parodies and pastiches. I criticize this conceit and suggest it hints at a Joycean desire to make artistic creation superior to sexual reproduction. Finally, in the phantasmagoria of “Circe,” we consider Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus’s hallucinations—sexual, political, artistic, and otherwise—including Bloom’s transgender masochism and utopian fantasy of the New Bloomusalem and Stephen’s triumph over his mother’s shade and epiphany about where and how to “kill the priest and the king.” The first 15 minutes are free to all; the rest requires a paid subscription. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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