To celebrate the centenary of Ulysses - published on February 2nd, 1922, RICORSO has created a series of tools and resources for student readers the nove in this index page to the Joyce related contents of the wider website and some teaching-specific texts developed at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland and now introduced at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte [UFRN] in Brazil.

The main contents of this index include a “Rapid Read” edition of Ulysses consisting of short extracts from each chapter; a summary of the characters and events of each, and a copy of the Gilbert/Linati Schema for Ulysses which Joyce provided (with notable variations) to his friend Stuart Gilbert and his Italian translator Carlo Linati. The Table of Contents of this Index is available lower on this page - infra.

Beside the teaching material in that table, the Index supplies links to a full-text copy of Ulysses in the 1960 Bodley Head reset edition. This may be read in conjunction with the annotations to the Odyssey Press edition of 1939 which forms the copy-text for Sam Slote’s annotated edition of Ulysses (2017; enl. 2022 - of which the former is available in Kindle).

There are numerous resources online for the study of Ulysses and for Joyce Studies more generally - including classic works of annotation and criticism (i.e., exegesis and analysis) and numerous blogs. A listing of these and other resources such as library collections - often with albums of holographs and photos - supplied on RICORSO Reference page James Joyce.

You can that page by navigating through RICORSO > Authors > “James Joyce” away from this page - or else view them within the Classroom frame (just like the page you are reading now). Select References in the function bar at the top of every screen, or browse the other categories of information and record.

Viewing options:

—To reach the James Joyce Pages of RICORSO through the present portal (including Life, Works, Criticism, Commentary, Quotations, Reference, & Notes) - click here.

—To reach the whole RICORSO website and navigate to the James Joyce Pages, click here.

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The Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1942) lived in the time of the Irish Literary Revival (1890-22), a movement led by the Nobel prize-winning poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). His identity as an Irish Catholic and a graduate of the newly-formed National University set him apart from the predominantly Protestant leadership of the Revival, on the one hand, and the mass of Irish Catholic nationalists on the other. Joyce’s intellectual brilliance and irrespressible self-esteem caused him to go into ‘self-exile’, taking with him his unmarried and largely uneducated partner Nora Barnacle, the inspiration for Molly Bloom and much else in his writing. (In fact, the date of his first tryst with Nora, 16 June 1904, became the day of his great novel Ulysses.)
 Joyce settled in Trieste and there he worked as an English-language teacher and wrote Ulysses. In 1919 he moved with his family to Paris to enjoy his newly won fame as the foremost Modernist writer in English secured through the serialisation of the novel (to be published in 1922). His first book was the stories of Dubliners (1914), an epoch-making treatment of the life of a regional city, as Dublin was in 1904 when he left it. Publication was delayed for a decade due to the publishers’ and printers’ fears of censorship. With his next, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) he changed the way in which autobiographical fiction is written and issued a clarion-call for intellectual freedom against the authoritarian culture of “priest and king” - and the central character, Stephen Dedalus, later puts it in Ulysses (1922).
  With the composition of a story called “The Dead” in 1907, Joyce ceased to be Stephen Hero - the title of his draft Portrait. “The Dead”, which forms the last part of Dubliners, displays a more mature and all-embracing conception of humanity that the earlier, mordantly satirical stories in which the theme of ‘spiritual paralysis’ lies at the centre of each. Meanwhile, in an abandoned story of 1906 to be called “Ulysses”, he had already sketched an encounter between young Stephen and an older man who works as an advertising agent for The Freeman’s Journal. That new character who came to be called Leopold Bloom was actually based on a man called Alfred Hunter who had rescued Joyce in a fight with several “tommies” [British soldiers] when the younger man was passing the evening drunkenly in the brothel quarter of the city - a real episode excerpted from his last year in Dublin.
  Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses is a dejected version of his forerunner in A Portrait. He has gone to Paris and returned for his mother’s death - without, it seems, becoming the literary hero that he had hoped. Leopold Bloom, by contrast, is an ordinary city-dweller with none of Stephen’s education. On the other hand he possesses a keen mind packed with much random information and therefore a fitting type for the new Everyman. Yet, in order to enter literature, as he does in Ulysses, he needed to be recognised by an artist as a proper hero for a modern Irish epic. It is essential to the autobiographical scheme of the novel that Stephen does not recognise Bloom as a fit subject for art whereas the mature Joyce (who is actually nearer Bloom's age than Stephen’s) does. It is from this discrepancy in age, outlook and experience that the comic humanism of Ulysses arises.
  Ulysses is divided into eighteen untitled chapters to which the now-familiar tags, taken from Homer’s Odyssey, have been added by the critics on the basis of chart or ‘schema’ which Joyce supplied to the author of the first book-length study of Ulysses (Stuart Gilbert) and to the Italian translator of the novel (Paulo Linati). In it, he delineated the main points of the Homeric parallel and some other ‘arts’, ‘organs’ and ‘correspondences’ which adorn each the symbolic design of each chapter, taking the Adventures of Ulysses by Charles Lamb - a classic redaction of Homer written in 1808 and still read in Joyce’s schooldays - as his keenly-felt inspiration. This ordering device or template became the of much critical attention from the start - especially after T. S. Eliot’s essay, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ appeared in an issue of The Dial (Oct. 1922).
  Eliot’s idea that Joyce uses myth to give order to ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ is not necessarily a true description of the spirit of the novel since Joyce was less daunted by modernity but the combination of such an apparatus with the liberal use of the stream-of-consciousness style of writing which was the chief technical innovation of Joyce’s novel found numerous imitators among writers such as Eliot himself, Virginia Wolff, George Faulkner, Thomas Woulfe and - in the most important Irish instance - Flann O’Brien.  Today the standing of Ulysses as the pre-eminent modern novel is undisputed.
  What is so remarkable about Ulysses? In it Joyce follows two characters’ travels through a single day in Dublin fully recording their thoughts from the inside by means the ‘interior monologue’ - these characters being Stephen and Dedalus along with Molly [Marion] Bloom in the magnificent chapter of eight unpunctuated sentences with which the novel ends. Molly is in bed when Bloom comes home. Pretending to be asleep, she reflects on her recent and less recent experience of woman’s life and men. Bloom, in his side, kisses her bottom in a sign of homage and acceptance and - the reader hopes - a renewal of their married life. (About that male gesture of affection she has mixed feelings too.)
  By means of the ‘itinerary’ form of the novel, Joyce captured an astonishing wealth of ascertainably-true details about the persons, places, businesses, institutions, entertainments and movements which characterised it on that day when, as we now know, Ireland was nigh-20 years away from Independence. In fact Joyce left Ireland before the revolutionary period properly began. The political humour of the novel is consistently anti-imperialist but it is not safe to assume that Joyce was pro-Independence in the form in which the modern Irish state actually emerged. On the contrary, he prove to be one of its sternest critics, recognising it as a reactionary country more than ever dominanted by clerical authority. The Roman not the Sassanach, he had earlier written, is the true tyrant of the country - meaning the Catholic Church more than the British Empire.
  Joyce derived many of the details of Ulysses from an annual city almanac called Hely-Thom’s Dublin Directory (1904) which he kept beside him as he wrote. Contemporary newspapers and information supplied by friends in response to epistolary request from him were also much in use. This very material aspect of the novel gives it a local rootedness unlike anything else in Western literature before. Joyce said that, if Dublin were destroyed it could be rebuilt brick by brick from his novel. Equally, in advancing from chapter to chapter - particularly after the serialised chapters became a literary beacon for many avant garde readers and writers - he greatly accelerated his experiments with style and form producing such tours-de-force as the synchronised and interspliced vignettes of “Wandering Rocks” (Ch. 10), the parody-history of English style in “Oxen of the Sun” (Ch. 14), the “Circe” episode (Ch. 15) where Joyce takes Stephen and Bloom to a brothel in the so-called Nighttown quarter of the city, and the Q&A catechism of “Ithaca”.

[Note: The title-names given above are in common used, based on our knowledge of Joyce"s intentions in the design of the novel but do not appear in the published novel itself. The central character of Homer’s Odyssey is called Odysseus (meaning ‘all-capable’) but the Romans called him Ulysses - as in Virgil’s Aeneid - and it was this form of the name which Charles Lamb adopted for his Adventures of Ulysses (1808) which Joyce read at school, and which is the immediate source of the Homeric parallels in his novel. A link to the “Circe” episode of Lamb’s book is available in a new window - as attached. ]

9: Scylla & Charybdis
2 p.m. - The National Library: In “Telemachus”, Mulligan tells Haines (and us) that Stephen is going to prove ‘that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father’. In the National Library at three in the afternoon he does something of the kind before a small audience comprised of Richard Best (Librarian), J. W. Lyster (Assistant Librarian), John Eglinton (a literati), George “AE” Russell (poet, economist co-founder of the Irish Literary Revival with W. B. Yeats), and Buck Mulligan who steps in at the end. Stephen’s creator, Joyce, spent much of 1911-12 studying the life and works of the most famous English playwright while preparing public lectures on Hamlet in Trieste. His talk is an astonishing salad of all such references, eliciting corresponding snippets of Shakespearean lore from his listeners who mainly disagree with his thesis the characters, themes and mood of Shakespeare’s successive plays follow course of his personal life between his early seduction by, and marriage to, Anne Hathaway, a woman somewhat older than he in his native town of Stratford-upon-Avon. (In Joyce’s view his manhood pride has been injured by the fact.) The later loss of his son Hamnet from diphtheria as a young man is also stitched into the attemp to show that Shakespeare become his own father in the sense that the murdered King Hamlet, not the avenging Prince Hamlet, is his counterpart in the famous play. He is thus his own creator spinning his art out of his experience - both the the facts and the larger psychological pattern of his life. Here Joyce is building on the main idea of George Brand’s Study of Shakespeare (trans. into English 1898), a book written by the biographer of Ibsen which strongly dispossessed him to endorse it. When, at the close, Eglinton asks Stephen if he believes his own theory he denies it yet the evidence is that Joyce himself did and certainly Stephen seems to to when, in “Circe”, he perfects his notion about the artist as a self-creating agency who fulfils his destiny by becoming himself - that “Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become”. There the sense begins to emerge that Ulysses is the fulfilment of the artist in keeping with words attributed here to George Sigerson (an elder Revivalist) who said, ‘Our national epic has yet to be written.’ The irony is, of course, that Ulysses IS that epic even if none of Stephen’s auditors can imagine that he will be the Homer of the newly-emerging Irish nation. Stephen fails to convince his Library audience who are all of Romantic school of thought that predominated in Dublin and elsewhere in the period. In philosophy they are Theosophists and Idealists preferring Plato to Aristotle, contrary to Joyce’s attachment to Realism in both philosophy and aesthetics. (Joyce laid his aesthetic ideas out in student orations (“Drama and Life”, 1900, and “James Clarence Mangan”, 1902), a pamphlet “The Day of the Rabblement” (1902) and later in his verse-satires, “The Holy Office” (1904) and “Gas from the Burner” (1909). On the personal front, moreover, Stephen learns that all of the literary clique among whom he finds himself at the Library are invited to a party at George Moore’s house later in the week to where he will not be welcome although Mulligan’s guest Haines will (see “Telemachus”). Throughout the episode he scores points against each of them in turn on account of their intellectual ineffectuality but also their appearance and personal failings including bachelorhood and self-love. When Buck Mulligan arrives, he characteristically reprises that seedy allegation in a mock play about masturbation and warns Stephen about the ‘wandering Jew’ whom he has seen peering at the bottom of the Crouching Venus exhibited on the Museum porch. This, of course, is Leopold Bloom on his way to the Library to gain access to a design in copies of the Freeman Journal to complete his advertisment for his client Keyes. Ireland’s epic will be written when Stephen and Bloom are united in a single work though unbeknownst to each. The Homeric parallel in the chapter concerns the Rocks and the Whirlpool between which Ulysses has to sail in the Odyssey. Here those two mythological monsters are equated with Idealism and Realism, Romanticism and Classicism, Theosophy and Common Sense. In order to pass through safely on his way the artist has to keep each at equal distance - or, rather, to make equal use of each (as Joyce does in the novel). [Open Ulysses chapter - here.]

12: Cyclops
5 p.m. - The Tavern (Barney Kiernan’s): “Cyclops” turns on the identification of an implacable Irish nationalist called Michael Cusack with the one-eyed monster of the Homeric epic whom Odysseus defeats by putting out his single eye with a burning brand and escaping from his cave with his men clinging to the wool of his enormous sheep. In the chapter, the burning brand is represented by a cheroot (‘knockmedown cigar’) and Bloom does flee from Barney Kiernan’s pub after his humanitarian and liberal words about war and nationhood arose the temper of ‘the Citizen’ to the extent that he hurls a biscuit tin after the hero of the novel as he departs in a horse-drawn cab (or, more likely, a side-car). Cusack was the founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association and all his talk is about regaining Ireland from the English ‘Sassenach’. Joyce employs an inflated language which he calls Gigantism and which is based on the Victorian translations of ancient Irish myth concerning Finn MacCool and other Irish mythological heroes. (Attempts to turn these in to the heroes of the literary revival were ultimately less successful than Joyce’s realism vein of writing.) The main strand of the narration is conducted but a sardonic individual who remains nameless but who is identified with Thersites in Homer’s Iliad. (Thersites is the foul-mouthed character who says what everyone else is thinking.) His contempt for the over-wrought nationalists is hardly less than that for Bloom whose supposed slyness and ingenuity are amply described in the chapter (‘he’d have a soft hand under a hen’). In fact, Bloom’s accidental racing tip given to M’Coy in “Lotus-Eaters” about the chances of Throwaway in the Cheltenham Gold Cup comes home to roost in this chapter. Cusack and the others round on Bloom and treat him as an alien - thus raising the spectre of xenophobia and anti-semitism. Bloom retaliates by talking about the persecution of the Jews in Morocco which is in the newspapers. In the key dialogue, he informs Cusack that Ireland is his country and that Christ was a Jew ‘like me’. It is this which leads to his flight, followed by Cusack’s dog Garryowen and the flying biscuit tin.  The chapter stands as a permanent affront to nationalist opinion in Ireland since it seems to suggest that the obsession with Irish cultural autonomy is really a form of blindness, given the complexity of modern life but Joyce is careful to supply a tally of information about the ills of colonialism in Ireland and there is nothing in Blooms attitude that can be regarded as a defence of imperialism or the British administration in Ireland - albeit he has a furled Union Jack behind his door at home, as we learn in a later chapter. [Open Ulysses chapter - here.]