“Preparatory to anything else…”

Dear Colleague,

We’re delighted to learn of your interest in the NEH Summer Seminar “James Joyce’s Ulysses: Texts and Contexts” we will be holding from June 18 to July 20, 2012, at Trinity College, Dublin. One city, one book, five weeks: this will be a heady, immersive experience as we traverse Joyce’s novel and the city from which it drew so much of its life. We will be walking, too, through nearly a century’s worth of Ulysses scholarship, tarrying with scholars past even as we try to discern—and to write—the next chapter of the book’s critical reception.

As project directors, we will have the happy task of assembling a group of 16 scholars with the goal of bringing to the seminar table a diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and approaches. The seminar will appeal predominantly to faculty in English and comparative literature programs, but we would be delighted to include scholars from allied disciplines like Irish studies. The audience for the seminar is not just Joyceans, but rather all current and prospective college and university faculty who have occasion to teach Ulysses in their modern literature courses, or to write about Ulysses in their scholarship. Given Joyce’s central position in the modern canon, that includes a great number of us.

We hope the information contained in this site will whet your appetite, and that you’ll consider submitting an application for “James Joyce’s Ulysses: Texts and Contexts.” If there are any specific questions that we can answer, please feel very free to write either of us at kevin.dettmar@pomona.edu or psain@english.upenn.edu.

Cordially,

Kevin J. H. Dettmar   &   Paul K. Saint-Amour

 

 

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