Skip to 0 minutes and 2 seconds (Banjo music plays) In 1904, 22 year old James Joyce met a young woman from Galway called Nora Barnacle. Nora had left home to work in a hotel. James had just returned from a failed attempt to study in Paris. He asked her for a date on Thursday, the 16th of June. They would spend the rest of their lives together. Nearly 18 years later, the day of that first date was celebrated in Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, a novel about a life and a day or day in a life - of various men and woman wandering like Odysseus and his mariners by the sea, around the streets in the pubs of Dublin.
Skip to 0 minutes and 48 seconds This course is aimed at those who would like to read Joyce, while providing ways into this fascinating and enjoyable comic artist. Ulysses will be at the centre, but a team of internationally-recognised Joyce scholars at the University of York will examine all of his work, from the short stories of Dubliners to the great experimental, multilingual work of later years, Finnegans Wake. He will explore the Joyce of everyday life, even if that is never a simple business. Histories of art and literature recur, as do the complexities of relations between men and women, governments and citizens, and competing sources of identity and nationality.
Skip to 1 minute and 24 seconds Above all, Joyce’s work is about a society in a small city on the western edge of European culture, suffering stagnation while hoping for change. And throughout his work, Joyce presses at the limits of fiction, at how we can write and what we can say.