Coursework: The Joys of Joyce

MODERN STORY: Since its first publication in 1922, James Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses has rewarded—and frustrated—readers who are willing to immerse themselves in the book’s blend of literary and linguistic styles, says Rochester poet and professor James Longenbach. (Photo: Getty Images)

In the century since its publication, James Joyce’s Ulysses has been described as beautiful, overrated, experimental, pornographic, dull, and genius.

“It’s also a great leveler,” says James Longenbach, the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester. He has taught Ulysses since the late 1980s as part of courses on modernism, an artistic approach that originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe and the United States and that’s characterized by experimentation with form and expression.

This spring, Longenbach led a graduate-level seminar centered on a detailed reading of the 700-plus-page novel. Such a course attracts serious-minded students wanting to experience a classic alongside a capable instructor (Longenbach makes clear that while he is “no Joyce scholar,” he has been fortunate to study with excellent teachers). The course also attracts physics and engineering students who are undaunted by a book that regularly ranks among the greatest—and most challenging—English-language works of fiction.

Published in 1922, Ulysses traces a single day, June 16, 1904, in the lives of several characters in Dublin, including “everyman” Leopold Bloom, aspiring artist Stephen Dedalus, and Leopold’s wife, Molly. Although the book’s 18 episodes are loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey (Ulysses is the Latinized version of the Greek name Odysseus), Longenbach cautions students against using the Homeric poem as a Rosetta Stone. “In the critical history of Ulysses, attempts to find a key often only succeeded in turning Ulysses into a lock,” he says.

Instead, Longenbach invites students to revel in the book’s panoply of literary and linguistic styles—from the journalistic headlines interrupting the “Aeolus” episode, to the florid, romantic language in “Nausicaa” (alongside a frank depiction of masturbation, which contributed to the book’s being banned in the US); from the stage directions in “Circe,” to Molly Bloom’s famous, mostly unpunctuated final soliloquy. Even the realism of the early episodes of Ulysses is a consciously crafted artifice, thrown into relief by the explosion of styles that follow.

“After all these years of teaching it, I still notice things I hadn’t before,” Longenbach says. And while Ulysses rewards readers, it will frustrate them, too. “At a certain point, you’re going to want to take the book and throw it across the room. That’s OK. It’s part of the reading process.”

ENG 549: Ulysses
Spring 2022
James Longenbach
The Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English

Ulysses by James Joyce
Longenbach has students read the version edited by Hans Walter Gabler, which attempts to produce an accurate and complete version of the book—no easy task given that Joyce wrote nearly a third of Ulysses on the print proofs, notes Longenbach.

Pre-Gabler editions, for example, have Stephen Dedalus receiving a telegram that reads, “Mother dying come home father,” correcting the original manuscript’s “nother” to “mother,” assuming a typo. “The Gabler edition, though, says nother, as Joyce did originally, leaving readers to ponder this ‘error,’ ” says Longenbach. “Now, are there mistakes in Gabler? Yes, but fewer.”

The Waste Land by T.  S. Eliot
Eliot, a contemporary and devoted admirer of Joyce’s, is among modernism’s major writers. Heavily influenced by Ulysses, Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is more than 400 lines long and similarly abounds with references and allusions.

Yet Longenbach doesn’t want students bogged down in annotations and explanations: “I’ve taught The Waste Land probably a thousand times, and I’ve never mentioned where anything is from. You need to feel the multiplicity of sources, the weirdness coming in.

“But ultimately every part of that poem is lyrically pure—what matters is how it sounds.”

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Another leading modernist writer was Woolf. While publicly praising Ulysses, she documented her criticisms of the book as “pretentious” and “a mis-fire” in her diaries and letters.

Among her best-known works is Mrs. Dalloway, which uses stream of consciousness to detail a day in the life of the protagonist and several others in post–World War I England. Published in 1925, the novel is “unbelievably beautiful,” says Longenbach, but also “unthinkable without the precedent of Joyce.” Both books explore their characters’ interiority while highlighting the importance of the seemingly inconsequential. “Except that Mrs. Dalloway associates that with femininity, culturally speaking, to a degree that Ulysses does not,” Longenbach says.

Editor’s Note
James Longenbach, who joined the faculty in 1985, died in July 2022. Over the course of his career at Rochester, he taught courses in modern and contemporary American poetry, British and American modernism, James Joyce, Shakespeare, and creative writing. His books of verse and of criticism include Forever (W. W. Norton, 2021), The Lyric Now (University of Chicago, 2020), How Poems Get Made (W. W. Norton, 2018), Earthling (W. W. Norton, 2017), The Virtues of Poetry (Graywolf, 2013), and The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf, 2008). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Slate, and The Yale Review.