But there’s a reason the “Gabler edition” may stand above most others. There is no definitive edition of Joyce’s Ulysses. On the other, it is an elaborate verbal confection, an intricately designed work of art that draws attention to its linguistic surface, sometimes at the expense of the very illusion of inner life that it also creates. On the one hand, it is a realistic novel, an unrelenting exploration of the inner and outer lives of three major characters and a multitude of minor ones. Here’s how Longenbach, in a 2013 article for The Yale Review, summed up Joyce’s most famous work:

Most of the novel follows Bloom as he traverses the city, endures an antisemitic tirade, crosses paths with Stephen, and ends his day back in bed alongside Molly, whose famous monologue concludes the novel.īut a plot summary doesn’t do the work justice. The main protagonists include “everyman” Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus (a young man-Joyce’s literary alter ego-struggling with the death of his mother), and Leopold’s wife, Molly. Published in 1922, the story traces a single day, June 16, 1904, in the lives of several characters in Dublin, Ireland. What is Ulysses by James Joyce about? “Two things at once,” argues Longenbach, one of which is language itself. Walton Litz, a great Joyce scholar, and I realized that if I didn’t teach Ulysses, I was squandering that experience,” he says.īased on insights from Longenbach’s years of reading, teaching, and writing about Ulysses, we’ve highlighted a few things you might not know about the 700-plus-page novel that regularly ranks among the greatest-and most challenging-English-language works of fiction. He has taught the book since the late 1980s as part of various undergraduate and graduate courses on literary modernism. “It’s also a great leveler,” says James Longenbach, the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester. In the century since its publication, James Joyce’s Ulysses has been described as beautiful, overrated, experimental, pornographic, dull, and genius. Here are a few things to know about the literary masterpiece that has exhilarated and confounded its readers for 100 years.

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