English 797(H)

ENGL 797(H): Special Studies in Literature: James Joyce's Ulysses Rod Mengham

Ulysses is the great "modernistic" novel---a gigantic short story set on a single day, an epic encyclopedia, a retelling of Homer, an Irish joke, a realistic novel of great psychological depth, and a compendium of English prose styles---and it can be read and enjoyed in six weeks. No prerequisite, but familiarity with Homer's Odyssey would be very helpful.

This course is available for graduate credit as English 897(H).

Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College. He is the author of books on Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë and Henry Green, as well as of The Descent of Language (1993). He has edited collections of essays on contemporary fiction, violence and avant-garde art, and the fiction of the 1940s, and was co-editor and co-translator of Altered State: the New Polish Poetry (Arc, 2003), and co-editor of Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Salt Publishing, 2005). His own poems are collected under the title Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2001). He has recently edited a book on contemporary fiction, and co-authored a book concerning Hardy's short stories. He has also been working on a collection of essays concerning art criticism and literature.