James Joyce: Why He's Worth the Effort

A full lecture on James Joyce — his life, his exile, and the three books that changed what fiction could do.

We begin in Dublin: the Jesuit education, the declining family, the Ireland of Parnell and the Catholic Church that Joyce felt closing around him.

From there we follow the full arc of his career: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the formation of the artist; Ulysses, its relationship to Homer's Odyssey, Leopold Bloom's single day in Dublin, and Molly's final Yes; and Finnegans Wake, the book that took seventeen years to write and pushed language further than any novel before or since.

This is a lecture for anyone who has always meant to read Joyce and never quite known where to start — and for anyone who already loves him and wants to go deeper.