“What did you do in the Great War, Mr. Joyce?”
“I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?”
—Tom Stoppard, Travesties (1974)

From September 2023 to May 2024, this reading group will convene once a month to discuss Ulysses. We will read the novel in its entirety over the course of our nine monthly sessions. Because of the book’s notorious complexity and considerable length, we will proceed at a slow pace, focusing on three, two, or sometimes only one of the novel’s eighteen chapters (or, in the Joycean idiom, “episodes”) per session. Our measured pace will provide those new to Ulysses with a gradual introduction to the novel; to those already familiar with Joyce and his works, it will provide a chance to test the worth of the adage that to read Joyce, one must reread him.

The copyright on most of Joyce’s works recently expired so affordable editions abound. The textual history of Joyce’s works, however, is highly fraught – this is especially true of Ulysses. Members of this reading group are for that reason strongly encouraged to use the 1986 edition of Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler and published by Vintage.

The reading schedule below is keyed to that edition. Please come to the first session having read the first two chapters of Ulysses.

This reading group meets on the third Sunday of the month in the Athenæum’s Bound, from 2-4pm.

Sun, September 17
Ulysses, Episodes 1 (“Telemachus”) & 2 (“Nestor”) [28 pages]

Sun, October 15
Ulysses, Episodes 3 (“Proteus”) & 4 (“Calypso”) [27 pages]

Sun, November 19
Ulysses, Episodes 5 (“Lotus Eaters”), 6 (“Hades”), & 7 (“Aeolus”) [66 pages]

Sun, December 17
Ulysses, Episodes 8 (“Lestrygonians”), 9 (“Scylla and Charybdis”), & 10 (“Wandering Rocks”)
[86 pages]

Sun, January 28 [POSTPONED FROM JANUARY 21]
Ulysses, Episodes 11 (“Sirens”) & 12 (“Cyclops”) [74 pages]

Sun, Februrary 18
Ulysses, Episodes 13 (“Nausicaa”) & 14 (“Oxen of the Sun”) [66 pages]

Sun, March 24 [POSTPONED FROM MARC 17]
Ulysses, Episode 15 (“Circe”) [148 pages]

Sun, April 21
Ulysses, Episodes 16 (“Eumaeus”) & 17 (“Ithaca”) [107 pages]

Sun, May 19
Ulysses, Episode 18 (“Penelope”) [38 pages]

The amount of writing on and about Joyce is enormous and it continues to grow by the day. Below, you will find a very selective list of general resources that participants may wish to consult before, during, or after the conclusion of this reading group. These recommendations are organized into three categories: annotations, biographies, and guides. Depending on the group’s evolving needs, more specific recommendations for further reading (including scholarly resources) will be made on a case-by-case basis. Any reading aside from Ulysses will remain entirely optional and will be treated as secondary during our group discussions.

Annotations
Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (University of California Press, 1974; revised and expanded 1988), a book-length work of annotations, was not the first of its kind (or, for that matter, the last), but it has had a lasting impact on how contemporary readers approach Joyce. This is an immense book, both in terms of sheer bulk (it is longer than most editions of Ulysses) and in terms of its depth of insight (which varies from the nearly indispensable to the slightly maddening). Ulysses Annotated remains an invaluable companion for any reading or re-reading of Joyce’s novel. Although participants are welcome to seek out this work (and to bring its insights into our discussion), readers new to Ulysses may find it more enjoyable to delay consulting Ulysses Annotated until they have completed the month’s reading.

Biographies
The preeminent Joyce biography remains Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1959; revised 1982). This volume holds a place of great importance in Joyce’s reception history. Ellmann’s biography, however, is not without its limitations and later readers of Joyce have made important contributions that expand on and revise Ellmann’s accomplished and foundational work. Two examples that variously act as supplements to and correctives of the Ellman biography are Peter Costello’s James Joyce: The Years of Growth 1882-1915 (Pantheon, 1992) and Brenda Maddox’s Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (Houghton Mifflin, 1988).

Participants looking for a more manageable account of Joyce’s life than Ellman’s tome are directed to Morris Beja’s James Joyce: A Literary Life (Ohio State University Press, 1992).

Guides
Unlike Joyce’s earliest readers, contemporary readers have the good fortune of several “guides” to Ulysses, which provide new and veteran readers a range of resources, from page-by-page paraphrases to detailed contextual readings. Among the earliest and most acclaimed of these guides was Harry Blamires’s 1966 volume The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses (Routledge, 1996). More contemporary examples of commentators working in the Blamires tradition include Laura Heffernan’s Sparknotes Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses (Spark Publishing, 2007) and Patrick Hastings’s The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). To these three guides, I would add Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (Norton, 2009), which charts a middle course between general guide and academic study.

Fabrizio Ciccone is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Brown University. He holds a B.A. in Literature from Sarah Lawrence College, an M.A. in English from Boston College, and has completed graduate-level coursework at the University of Texas at Austin, Boston University, and Harvard University. In addition to working with high school students and adult learners, he has taught college-level literature, film, and composition courses in the English departments of the University of Texas at Austin, Boston College, Brown University, and Simmons University. His primary area of expertise is twentieth-century British, Irish, and American fiction, and he has a special interest in the history and theory of comedy from the eighteenth century to the present.