Curriculum

2012 Season — A New Course on Joyce, for beginners

Penetrating the ‘Impenetrable’: A Beginner’s Guide to reading Ulysses

Classes will be restricted to 25 students and a waiting list will be kept. If demand warrants, a second class may be formed.

The course will be delivered by Associate Professor Frances Devlin-Glass (Ph.D., ANU), who has been the Director of Bloomsday since its inception in 1994, and who has taught Joyce at tertiary and other levels since 1980. She is a member of the College of Distinguished Deakin Educators, and the recipient of national and university teaching grants and awards.


Curriculum
This is an intensive course conducted by Bloomsday in Melbourne for perplexed beginning readers, on 19 Feb. from 10am-5pm, 19 February, Celtic Club, corner Queen and LaTrobe Streets, Melbourne.

James Joyce’s Ulysses has an undeserved reputation for being impossibly difficult to read. Having said that, it is demanding, and is better done with a guide in the first instance. This course aims to demystify the novel, make it less formidable and intimidating, and to create enjoyment of its riches, in particular its subversive but wise comedy. The style of the course is a mix of lectures and discussion, and participants are encouraged to bring their own copies of Joyce, preferably an annotated edition (the Penguin Student’s edition, or the Oxford University Press editions are both excellent, or alternatively, if you are using an unannotated edition, you might consider purchasing Gifford and Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated, cheaply available from good bookstores, like Readings, who will cheerfully place an order for you.


In More Detail.....
The curriculum will focus on the simpler chapters of Ulysses and has the following main components:

Session 1
10am -1pm: The Architecture of a ‘baggy monster’

• Joyce’s principles of organisation. Having a sense of how minutely and interestingly organised the novel is is a key strategy for understanding. Various ways of analysing its structure, some authorised by Joyce, will be undertaken.

Session 2
2-3.30pm: Getting up to speed on narrative techniques in Ulysses – how the novel teaches you to read it.

• Learn about free indirect discourse
• Varieties of stream of consciousness technique
Starting with Bloom, and culminating in Molly’s great soliloquy. This will be a good introduction to Bloomsday 2012 which will focus on Penelope, the last chapter in the book.

Session 3
4-5 pm: The Comedy of Joyce

Practising reading the user-friendly chapters Calypso 4, Hades 6, Penelope 18.
Having pre-read these three chapters will make the course more profitable for students.

5pm: Time to repair to the bar downstairs.

Download curriculum in PDF format here.