During the Festival, Dr Katy Mullin of the University of Leeds led a guided reading group exploring James Joyce’s Ulysses. Although the event is now over you can read the extracts they studied and explore some of the resources Dr Mullin suggested….

Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses

Since Ulysses is such a long and capacious novel, the four sessions will concentrate on four episodes: ‘Calypso’ (chapter 4), ‘Cyclops’ (chapter 12), ‘Nausicaa’ (chapter 13) and ‘Penelope’ (chapter 18).

These episodes introduce and focus on Joyce’s central protagonist, 38 year old Jewish ad-man Leopold Bloom. They tell us much about his relationship to his fellow Dubliners, and to his wife Molly, whose soliloquy forms the final episode.

You may find the following links useful:

A useful plot summary can be found at

http://www.rosenbach.org/ulysses-plot-summary.

There’s even a cartoon version, now available as an app:

http://www.ulyssesseen.com/

Many of the ephemeral references that make up the fabric of Ulysses’s material and imaginative world have been glossed here and arranged by

episode: http://www.joyceimages.com/.

The Wikipedia entry on Ulysses also offers a plot summary, and a good section on the history of the novel, which was banned for obscenity on its first publication in 1921: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)

The Wikipedia entry on James Joyce himself is accurate and helpful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce

If you would prefer to buy a guide to Ulysses, the best and most comprehensive is Harry Blamaires, ‘The New Bloomsday Book’, published by Routledge.

Dr Katy Mullin