The Great Courses - Joyce’s Ulysses - James A.W. Heffernan

Category: Adults, Documentary, Education, Literature
Language: English
Keywords: James Joyce Ulysses TTC

Written by James A.W. Heffernan
Read by James A.W. Heffernan
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 48 Kbps
Unabridged

James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses is a big, richly imagined, and intricately organized book with a huge reputation. T. S. Eliot, bowled over by Joyce’s brilliant manipulation of a continuous parallel between ancient myth and modern life, called it “the most important expression which the present age has found … [one] to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”

Ulysses depicts a world that is as fully conceived and vibrant as anything in Homer or Shakespeare. It has been delighting and puzzling readers since it was first published on Joyce’s 40th birthday, February 2, 1922.

It is, perhaps, a book whose pleasures you’ve always wanted to learn to savor but never quite worked yourself up to reading. And who can blame you? After all, Joyce himself famously boasted that “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant!”

This is where Professor Heffernan’s lectures help. Whether or not you have read this book, you’ll find that his lectures, the fruit of decades of distinguished teaching, make an excellent guide to the many-layered pleasures of this modern epic.

Illuminating the dramatic and artistic integrity behind the novel’s most notoriously challenging passages, he explains why this frank, pathbreaking novel was praised as a landmark and damned as obscene—even banned—as soon as it first appeared