This was from about ten years ago when Ulysses was named the Novel of the Century by a panel of experts. It's scanned from an old copy, as I gave the original to someone.
And this one is probably more helpful, as it reduces Ulysses down into more easily digestible form. It's accurate enough for classroom use, so feel free to crib from it, but please provide attribution.
The only Joyce work I've really read is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though I've read a good bit of Dubliners. We read PotAaaYM in 11th grade and I enjoyed it well enough, with help from a good English teacher. I've tried Finnegan's Wake a few times without success. It's one of those works you can only approach after a good bit of preparation, study, exercise, dieting and psychic purging I guess, and I'm not yet worthy. You can't just plunge in and let it wash over you, which is how I read Gravity's Rainbow and most of the rest of Thomas Pynchon. After 3 or 4 times swimming through it, Gravity's Rainbow made perfect sense. No it didn't, but it became less obscure. The first few times I just enjoyed the jokes, songs and vivid scenes and didn't worry too much. Actually, I only read it the first time after I heard that Pynchon, a notorious recluse, sent the vaudeville comic Professor Irwin Corey to pick up the National Book Award he won for Gravity's Rainbow and I thought, hey, that book's bound to be a hoot. If I was braver I'd do a cartoon about Gravity's Rainbow, but not yet. I'll wait for my 15th read through, which won't happen till sometime in 2035 at my present rate.
Meanwhile, happy Bloomsday, and if you go on any epic pubcrawls, let me know.
