Ulysses Annotated

Book Description

Here substantially revised and expanded, Don Gifford's annotations to Joyce's great modern classic comprise a specialized encyclopedia that will inform any reading of Ulysses. Annotations in this edition are keyed both to the reading text of the new critical edition of Ulysses published in 1984 and to the standard 1961 Random House edition and the current Modern Library and Vintage texts.
Gifford has incorporated over 1,000 additions and corrections to the first edition. The introduction and headnotes to sections provide general geographical, biographical and historical background. The annotations gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, trace literary allusions and references to other cultures.
The suggestive potential of minor details was enormously fascinating to Joyce, and the precision of his use of detail is a most important aspect of his literary method. The annotations in this volume illuminate details which are not in the public realm for most of us.

Customer Reviews:

Essential is the key word to all these reviews.......2006-11-13

When I first tucked James Joyce's ULYSSES under my arm, Don Gifford's ULYSSES ANNOTATED was tucked under the other. (My biceps became very well developed because of this.) It took me an entire summer to read the books side by side but how worthwhile it was. Gifford's essential line by line, almost word by word, guidance made ULYSSES less overwhelming than if I had tried to tackle it alone. Once I got through ULYSSES the second time (the following spring) I was able to go to the more overarching analyses of Joyce's masterpiece. Stuart Gilbert's ULYSSES and Richard Ellmann's ULYSSES ON THE LIFFEY were particularly helpful.

notes only!.......2006-05-17

Just a heads up that this is NOT an annotated edition of Ulysses (as I mistakenly thought in purchasing)(duh). It is 600-some pages of notes only and does not include the text of the novel.

The essential guide.......2005-01-11

I am still digesting "Ulysses." I read it while walking around Dublin a few years ago. It was marvelous to trace the steps of Leopold and Molly, and to see what they "saw," but the novel remains a distant pleasure to the reader. I must admit it is not the most accessible book ever written, but it gets four stars for its intent ... and that it is better than "Finnegan's Wake." Be warned: This book is not for the casual reader. But this annotated edition makes it all worthwhile. You'll get genuine, comprehensible guidance. If you must read "Ulysses," this edition might be most helpful.

Thorough, but not best for the novice reader.......2003-05-04

Gifford's book offers fascinating glosses and contextual annotations for Ulysses, but was not quite what I was looking for to help me with my first attempt at the book. The annotations are mostly disjoint explanations of specific allusions and references.

There are other guides to Ulysses that are better suited for the novice Joyce reader, helping the reader to keep track of the plot, the progress of the Odyssey and Hamlet corelations and explaining the shifts in style through the book. This kind of hand-holding may be unnecessary for more sophisticated readers, but for my first read, it was essential!

Break it Down.......2002-10-11

All the surface details, references to mythology, history, politics, music, literature, etc, can be found in this book (Joyce's novel is not included within, just the annotations, but it still clocks in at 700 pages!). If you want to know exactly what Joyce was referring to--this is the place. However, it won't necessarily tell you what he MEANT (aheheh, some things must be left to the reader).

Of course, if you've never read Ulysses you don't need to know every obscure reference. Just pick up REJOYCE or THE NEW BLOOMSDAY BOOK, which have generalized overviews of the novel. This is for the deep scholars. But as Joyce said, all he expects of his readers is that they study his works for the rest of their lives.

Customer Reviews:

Great Joyce Notes.......2006-02-28

This book provides excellent and clear references to otherwise obscure persons, locales, Irish slang, and turn-of-the-century (19th to 20th) Dublin culture that are so integral to the Joyce stories. Well worth the purchase.

Average customer rating:

Ulysses, great or not ?
ULYSSES is Joyce's Retelling of the Homerian Epic . Massive, Maddening, Enigmatic and Priceless
A REAL FAILURE AS A NOVEL
Classic of Modern Literature
Well, it's a classic, it once earned deserved praise as new & original but...

Ulysses (Gabler Edition)
James Joyce , and Hans Gabler
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Ulysses Annotated
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)
Finnegans Wake (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses
Dubliners (Oxford World's Classics)

ASIN: 0394743121
Release Date: 1986-05-12

Amazon.com

Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus

Book Description

Considered the greatest 20th century novel written in English, in this edition Walter Gabler uncovers previously unseen text. It is a disillusioned study of estrangement, paralysis and the disintegration of society.

Download Description

The 1934 text, as corrected and reset in 1961. Ulysses is one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. It was not easy to find a publisher in America willing to take it on, and when Jane Jeap and Margaret Anderson started printing extracts from the book their literary magazine The Little Review in 1918, they were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity. They were fined $100, and even The New York Times expressed satisfaction with their conviction. Ulysses was not published in book form until 1922, when another American woman, Sylvia Beach, published it in Paris for her Shakespeare & Company. Ulysses was not available legally in any English-speaking country until 1934, when Random House successfully defended Joyce against obscenity charges and published it in the Modern Library. This edition follows the complete and unabridged text as corrected and reset in 1961. Judge John Woolsey's decision lifting the ban against Ulysses is reprinted, along with a letter from Joyce to Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House, and the original foreword to the book by Morris L. Ernst, who defended Ulysses during the trial.

Customer Reviews:

Ulysses, great or not ?.......2007-09-20

Probably every avid reader feels compelled at some time in life to read "Ulysses", especially as it was voted the best work of fiction of the 20th century at the turn of this millenium.

The style of writing throughout the book is usually referred to as "stream of consciousness". This method has been subsequently employed in other works such as "To The Lighthouse" and "The sound and the Fury". However, in my opinion, these latter two works used the style much more succesfully than Joyce.

If you are currently reading "Ulysses" at the moment, expect a very patchy book. The second half is , in general, better than the first half, with the two penultimate chapters "Cabman's shelter" and "Ithaca" standing out from the rest. After that, the description of birth in "Oxen in the sun" is also excellent , as is the part dsecribing Paddy Dignam's funeral early in the book. As to the rest of the book, I believe there is little to recommend it.

Opinion tends to be polarized about "Ulysses" . Its severest critics suggest that it is only praised by those who are scared to be criticized for not understanding the book, a sort of "emperor's new clothes" scenario. There is, however, more than a grain of truth in this opinion. It does seem incredible that a book with so much "padding" could be so highly thought of. It might have made a very good book of around 200 pages, but one does have the sensation that Joyce is taking his readers for a ride in many parts. ( Of course, his ultimate send up of his readers was "Finnegan's Wake"! ). Furthermore, the much lauded sense of humour is overblown. At best, this is a mildly amusing book with one or two laugh out loud lines. To label it as "very funny" is pretentiousness itself. Most of the humour is also of the "toilet" variety.

On the positive side, there are some interesting passages as mentioned above. However, the main interest lies in seeing this new attempt at a style of writing , and to try to fathom out why this book has become the "darling" of the ( maybe "so-called" ) intellectuals. If you want to see a better example of joyce's talents, try "Potrait Of The Artist As A Young Man", or even "The Dubliners".

ULYSSES is Joyce's Retelling of the Homerian Epic . Massive, Maddening, Enigmatic and Priceless.......2007-09-13

James Joyce (1882-1941) was a tormented Roman Catholic who forsook his faith, picked up his pen and wrote the great novel "Ulysses" based on the epic poem "The Odyssey" by Homer. It is impossible to explain Ulysses or give it an adequate review in the short space alloted this reviewer. Howwver, I would offer the following thoughts for those brave souls eager to enter the labyrinthal complexities of a genius's mind:
Joyce tells the story of one day in the life of the people of Dublin, Ireland on June 16, 1904 (the day he first met his wife Nora Baracle). As he does so in eighteen chapters linked with similar episodes in "The Odyssey." During the day (about 900 pages) we follow the two chief characters on their peregrinations and adventures. Those characters are:
Stephen Dedalus-Named for the Greek mytholgical figure Dedalus who builds wings to fly in the sky; his son Icarus flies too close to the sun and perishes while Dedalus lands in Sicily. Stephen was the chief character in Joyce's "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." He is tormented by his failure to pray at his dying mother's bedside; tormented by the Roman Catholic Church's burden of guilt laid upon his soul. Stephen is an aspiring author. He is ambivalent in his feelings toward his native Ireland. As the novel begins he is living in the English built castle
The Martello Tower along with his friend Buck Mulligan and an Englishman named Haines. Stephen is a teacher who is supervised by the horrible Deasy a West Englishman who in an Orange Protestant. Deasy is a false Nestor to the callow Stephen. Stephen is an intellectual with biographical correspondence to the author James Joyce.
Leopold Bloom-A 38 year old advertising man who is married to the sensuous Molly. Bloom is a middlebrow who roams the streets of Dublin plying his advertising career engaging in arguments, dreaming about a sexy young thing on the beach and saving Stephen from trouble in the famous Nighttime section of the book. Leopold does not practice his Judaism. His father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant. The novel ends with Bloom returning home to his unfaithful wife Molly just as Odysseus returned home to his faithful wife Penelope in the Homeric epic. Bloomsday is celebrated worldwide on Feb. 2 each year (the date of Joyce's birth in 1882).
c. Molly Bloom-Her nearly fifty pages of stream of consciousness prose was until recently the longest sentence in the English language. She is a coarse, bawdy, serially cheating wife to Bloom.
I do not claim to understand everything going on in Ulysses. Joyce said it would take the professors and critics centuries to explore its rich minefield of literary allusions, jokes, and analysis of the human condition. Ulysses has been banned and blasted by literary critics as the same time it has been praised. You may find out yourself by giving it a close reading with a good commentary handy. Joyce plums the depths of the human mind. He is a great Irish genius whose work demands study.

A REAL FAILURE AS A NOVEL .......2007-08-03

As a devout modernist, I put off the pleasure of reading this book for years. I wanted to have the time and leisure to give it proper attention. I had taken a seminar with Anthony Burgess on ULYSSES at CCNY in the early seventies. We did a close reading of the Nighttown chapter and were supposed to read the rest of the novel on our own. I never did. But Burgess' enthusiasm was impressive and though I wasn't entirely convinced, I was certainly intrigued. In earlier years I had read DUBLINERS and PORTRAIT and even some of FINNEGANS WAKE and was especially impressed by Joyce's mastery of language and the poetic quality of his prose.

An early retirement offer finally had me reading the "GREATEST NOVEL OF THE 20th CENTURY" last month in Riverside Park. Some nice cigars added to the mix.

The first few chapters were stunning. The powers of description, the playfulness and musicality of language, the wit and intelligence of Stephen and Buck were a delight. I was obviously in the hands of a master. Shakespeare even came to mind.

But then something happened. The humanity and poetry seemed to drain out of the thing as we were treated to yet another chapter of theoretical "experimentation in narrative technique". The idea of writing a novel, each chapter of which is written in a parodistic or borrowed style seems to me a doomed one. (And more postmodernist than modernist). Apparently even Ezra Pound objected. I found myself asking, "Couldn't Joyce have found his own voice and style to narrate this section?" An entire narrative chapter in the question and answer form of a Catholic Catechism seems affected at first. After thirty pages it is deadly and even embarrassing. And then another in the style of a men's sporting magazine, and then another in the style of a women's magazine? What's the point? (Other than showing off?) And the Freudian/Surrealist kitsch of the endless Nighttown chapter was downright infantile. Talk about dated! This is novel writing from the outside in. First you have an "experimental" concept and then you fit in some narrative stuff. It's no wonder academics use this book as major fodder. It seems to be written with them in mind.

Likewise the useless tie ins with Homer's ODYSSEY. One can't help thinking of them as a desperate attempt to add structure, incident and theme to a book fairly bereft of them. Not to mention adding a bit of literary pedigree to offset the "obscenity".

Which brings me to my last point. The fancy smorgasbord of styles cannot disguise that as a novel, ULYSSES is sorely lacking. All the criteria by which we judge a novel - character depth and development, involving narrative, thematic focus, depth of feeling etc., seem totally absent. Basically what we have here is a brief Balzacian "realist" sketch, padded out and styled-up beyond belief.

Now this is really a minority opinion: not only is ULYSSES a failure, but the reason I think it is a failure is that it is a transitional work. Joyce was obviously bored with novelistic narrative but still felt obliged to accommodate. With FINNEGANS WAKE, he hit stride and finally found his métier - a book as a place to play with language and psyche for his own pleasure, without regard for traditional novelistics.

A NOTE ON EDITIONS: The huge academic controversy about which edition of ULYSSES is "authentic" or "correct" is, as one might expect, much ado about very little. Serious textual issues are minimal. Most of the typos in the 1922 edition were corrected in 1960/1 by the editors of the Modern Library in consultation with Richard Ellmann. That text was also used for the Bodley Head and current Everyman editions. Gabler later went overboard, making some highly questionable decisions. His edition is also difficult to read due to small print, layout, line-numbering etc. Danis Rose's edition went even further and "corrected" Joyce's compound words etc. - a disgrace.

I ended up reading an online version edited by Jorn Barger - a very sensible amalgam of the best work of previous editors. It took some time and expense to print out, but it was definitely worth it.

Classic of Modern Literature.......2007-07-23

While this text is undoubtedly one of the most difficult that I have read, the sheer skill at manipulating language that Joyce demonstrates is remarkable. The result is a novel that offers a most intimate study into the human method of thinking.

Not for the faint of heart, however, because this is a text that requires dedication, as the games that Joyce plays with language and the thinking of his characters often obfuscates the meaning.

Well, it's a classic, it once earned deserved praise as new & original but..........2007-07-10

Many scenes stick in one's mind forever, for example when Leopold Bloom releases his bowels or when the coffin falls on the road. I finally came to understand the stream-of-consciousness technique and realized it's not Joyce's stream we're wading in but the carefully reproduced stream of the character's consciousness. I found this particularly effective and fun reading of Stephen Dedalus's morning at school. Other scenes like Molly Bloom's grand finale are simply beautiful and literally breathless, especially if you take punctuation as a breathing signal.

And I'm especially glad to read it now that I live in Dublin. I've lived in Ringsend three months, I've visited a friend in Mullingar, and I've shopped at Buckley's butcher shop, all of which are mentioned in Ulysses. I even bought my copy of the book at the Martello tower featured at the start of the novel.

But overall, one feels Ulysses is somewhat contrived. Crucify this humble critic if you will, but reproducing the structure of the Odyssey is a clever but artificial way of bringing epic grandeur to what is nothing more than a very ordinary day. Why go through all that trouble? I do agree with the lesson but find it rather long winded. In painting, a still life by Chardin is as realistic as an imperial coronation scene by David, but with much less fuss.

And then there are the inside jokes. References to Walt Whitman and to Edgar Allen Poe (which I got only because I remembered Tom Hanks reciting Poe's "To Helen" in The Ladykillers) and other writers abound. Shouldn't a great work stand on its own, at least where its intended audience is concerned? Ulysses fails utterly in this respect unless we restrict the audience to academics.

Vincent Poirier, Dublin

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Works if given a chance
I hope there's better out there
ULYSSELESS
A way in to Ulysses
An excellent companion piece

James Joyce's Ulysses
Stuart Gilbert
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Ulysses
Ulysses Annotated
Ulysses (Cliffs Notes)
James Joyce (Oxford Lives)
The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses

ASIN: 0394700139
Release Date: 1955-01-12

Book Description

With the passing of each year, Ulysses receives wider recognition and greater acclaim as a modern literary classic. To comprehend Joyce's masterpiece fully, to gain insight into its significance and structure, the serious reader will find this analytical and systematic guide invaluable. In this exegesis, written under Joyce's supervision, Stuart Gilbert presents a work that is at once scholarly, authoritative and stimulating.

Customer Reviews:

Works if given a chance.......2007-01-16

Four stars, not five, if only because I do agree somewhat that this study can be as complex as the novel itself. I think that the reason for this is that Joyce's work is, indeed, so rich and allusory that a full-length treatment like this is demanded. Ulysses is to the novel what Jorge Borges's short stories are to that literary art form.

By the way, 12 years ago I took a college course on Joyce and spent seven weeks of the twelve-week semester on Ulysses alone. Believe me, that wasn't nearly enough time. Yet, the presense of a knowledgeable mentor was invaluable in understanding this wonderful novel.

Stuart is the next best thing to having such a person nearby, but be forewarned--you will still need all of your analytical skills. Ulysses is a complete education, and as such entails a lifetime journey.

I hope there's better out there.......2006-07-06

I am reading Ulysses for the first time, and, yes, this book helps tremendously in understanding Ulysses. I'd be lost without it much of the time. BUT it's not a wonderful book. Gilbert quotes extensively from Ulysses -- for those people who don't actually want to read Ulysses, he says in the intro. -- but doesn't bother to translate quotes that are in French or Latin or Greek. The quotes from Ulysses often aren't introduced or explained well -- there just there. In fact, most quotes, from Joyce or from other sources, aren't well explained -- some chapters seem to have none of his own words, just quote after quote -- and because of that, I certainly wouldn't call this book a "good" text. Certainly, it is useful, and I don't regret the time spent reading it, but I am sure that there are more-accessible studies out there.

ULYSSELESS.......2005-05-04

And I really hate calling it that, since this book, a thick paperback, was obviously carefully and comprehensively written by a man who was deeply immersed in and respectful of his subject. But my verdict stands.

The reason I call book useless is that, believe it or not, it's almost as impenetrable as the text it purports to explain! Perhaps this was because the author, Stuart Gilbert, was actually a friend of Joyce's, and Joyce actually helped him write it. Note also that it was written only 8 years after the publication of "Ulysses" -- in 1930.

As such, it was seminal in laying out a lot of the main themes of the novel (Gilbert's famous "schemata" is still referred to these days). Seminal, yeah -- but the tone, level, and direction of Joyce criticism (not to mention the literary preparation of would-be exegetes of "Ulysses") have undergone much change in the last 75 years, to say the least.

Sound flippant? Well, be aware that, in addition to being completely conversant with all of English and continental literature, Gilbert expects you to be able to negotiate classical Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and German, much as "Ulysses" does. Quotations and allusions in these languages are liberally sprinkled throughout the book -- and the footnotes explaning them contain not translations but even more abstruse glosses!

The whole premise is ridiculous. I can't see who would possibly be helped by this book, despite the fact that nearly all of the various editions of "Ulysses" cite it as helpful secondary reading. For accomplished critics, perhaps. But for the average reader out there, the searingly obviously problem is that anybody in possession of the cultural firepower and reading acumen needed to read this book . . . would have no need of its insights! If you can understand Gilbert, you sure as a shot could understand Joyce without much assistance. Was Gilbert writing to himself?

Yes, best steer thee elsewhere. There's something out there called the "New Bloomsday Book" (careful you don't unnecessarily buy the hardback), which most students these days find far more helpful and more in consonance with their needs and sensibilities.

Of the various kinds of "Cliff's Notes" out there, probably the most useful is the original, the black-and-yellow striped "Cliff's Notes," followed closely by the "ClassicNotes." Avoid the Sparknotes and the Barron's.

A way in to Ulysses .......2005-01-20

Gilbert provides insight into Ulysses which it is extremely doubt the reader can get alone. He provides the overall plan of the work, the diagram of each sentence and how it coordinates with all the categories which Joyce combined in constructing his encyclopediac work. Stuart was at one point close to Joyce and has much of his information from the master himself. I do not know if there is a better guide, but this as the first is a very good one. It helped me understand at least the outline of the work and its basic structure.

An excellent companion piece.......2005-01-11

I am still digesting "Ulysses." I read it while walking around Dublin a few years ago. It was marvelous to trace the steps of Leopold and Molly, and to see what they "saw," but the novel remains a distant pleasure to the reader. I must admit it is not the most accessible book ever written, but it gets four stars for its intent ... and that it is better than "Finnegan's Wake." Be warned: This novel is not for the casual reader. This is one of several excellent accompaniments to "Ulysses" and well worth the price and the time to compare against Joyce.

James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man: A Casebook (Casebooks in Criticism)

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Casebook was a good guide
A good guide

James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man: A Casebook (Casebooks in Criticism)

Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Literature & Fiction | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism)
Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism)

ASIN: 0195150767

Book Description

This casebook offers a comprehensive introduction to this landmark in modern fiction. The essays collected here will help first-time readers, teachers, and advanced scholars gain new insight into Joyce's semi-autobiographical story of an Irish boy's slow and difficult discovery of his artistic vocation. Mark Wollaeger's introduction provides an overview of the composition and early reception of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as well as a survey of some of the recurrent issues debated by literary critics. Essays by Hugh Kenner and Patrick Parrinder offer both indispensable overviews of the entire novel-its themes, structure, and idiom-and close attention to specific interpretive cruxes. Other essays include classic responses by Wayne Booth, Fritz Senn, Michael Levenson, Helene Cixous, and a newly revised and expanded version of Maud Ellmann's groundbreaking "Polytropic Man." Together the essays bring into focus the wide range of questions that have kept A Portrait fresh for the new millennium.

Customer Reviews:

Casebook was a good guide.......2006-03-09

The casebook on Portrait was very helpful to me. I had to use if for a project in my English class and it was nice to have such a wide variety of criticisms in one place. I also liked that each cricicism was labeled so I didn't have to scan through it to know what it focused on.

A good guide.......2003-11-13

James Joyce's A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN is arguably one of the defining works of 20th century modernism. It set the standard that many writers who employed stream of consciousness narration (Woolf, Faulkner, et al.) would follow. This collection of essays is a good way to familiarize yourself, not only with the novel, but with the Joycean scholarship that followed. Some essays are better than others: Ellman's stands out as particularly good. Some essays drag. Still, I would recommend this to anyone embarking on "A Portrait".

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Semicolonial Joyce

Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cultural Margins)
James Joyce and the Question of History
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

ASIN: 0521666287

Book Description

Semicolonial Joyce is the first collection of essays to address the importance of Ireland's colonial situation in understanding the work of James Joyce. The volume reflects the ambivalences in Joyce's relationship with Irish nationalism, bringing together leading commentators on a topic that has attracted growing interest in recent years. The contributions both draw on and question the achievements of postcolonial theory, presenting a range of voices rather than a single position, and provide fresh insights into Joyce's resourceful engagement with political issues that remain highly topical today.

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork

Average customer rating:

If you are looking for insight
Truly a skeletal key
night keys to the skeleton of a wake
As Joseph Campbell books go, this is one of the rare ones that did not wow me.
Pattern Recognition Run Amok

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork
Joseph Campbell , and Henry Morton Robinson
Manufacturer: New World Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1577314050

Book Description

Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake - James Joyce's masterwork, which consumed a third of his life - have given up after a few pages, dismissing it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first "key" or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of Finnegans Wake. The authors break down Joyce's "unintelligible" book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. They outline the book's basic action, and then simplify — and clarify — its complex web of images and allusions. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is the latest addition to the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series.

Customer Reviews:

If you are looking for insight .......2007-08-13

The book is by far one of the best on Finnegans Wake. If you are or are not familiar with the story and James Joyce, this book with get you there.
Insightful, keep your copy of Finnegans Wake beside you while you read Joseph Campbell's work and enjoy the ride.

Truly a skeletal key.......2007-02-24

A very good guide to Finnegans Wake with amazing insights, but it's often difficult to see how they came about. While many things are purposely left unexplained, you can at least know who's talking to whom, and what the general drift of conversations are when you take on Finnegans Wake.

night keys to the skeleton of a wake.......2007-02-04

finnagans wake is not comprehensible. it is not like reading or watching a film. Mr.Joyce spoke over a dozen languages fluently and this book is in English and french and Swahili and Italian and Latin, Greek AND mostly in his own language which is kindof like English. it is not understandable because some many words are derivative of others, the characters are always changing and the story is circular. It took a quarter of a lifetime to write and may well take that or longer to grasp. it also has many meanings depending on your perspective. One-review claims it is contains the recipe for making an atomic bomb, oh well. Campbell and Robinson have done just what they say- given the reader a skeleton- you supply the body and sole. A marvelous book to read and extremely helpful bones to knaw.

As Joseph Campbell books go, this is one of the rare ones that did not wow me........2007-01-15

It's takes a man who possesses such academic prowessness and a healthy ego to tackle anything Joyce has done. Who wouldn't want to be like Champollion decoding Egyptian heirglyphics or the first man to land on the moon? Well Joseph Campbell tried and he ended up with an outline that seemed fairly obvious if you read the book once or twice. There is a shorter outline version already provided in the Penguin edition of Finnegans Wake that covers pretty much the same territory as Campbell does and gets more to the point. Although, I have to say I admire Campbell for having tried to crack the Finnegan Code.

Pattern Recognition Run Amok.......2006-07-04

This won't be received well.

I know that.

But, there's little point in my writing this if I'm not going to be truthful. I've read this book and the book upon which this is written, and this is what I've found:

Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key purports to explain the incomprehensible "masterwork" Finnegans Wake. It does offer up an explanation of sorts but this explanation, itself, makes little sense. Further, apart from a small "demonstration passage" early in the work, Campbell offers next-to-no evidence that what he divines is in the Wake itself.

Campbell believes that Finnegans Wake is the story of the cyclical nature of man as expressed in the writings of some obscure philosopher named Vico who, for all I can tell, found his greatest glory in the critical commentary on Finnegans Wake. That's well and good, but the Wake is a mass of 600+ pages of senseless rambling. Why does it take Joyce 600+ pages to communicate a story that Campbell can neatly summarize in the first fifteen pages of his work? Because, according to Campbell, Joyce tells this story over and over again in a "dream language."

According to Campbell, the Wake is one tiny story repeated a thousand times, enshrouded in a rebus-like pseudo-language of puns and portmanteaus. The only thing worse than the suspicion that Campbell is just as fradulent as Joyce is the suspicion that, maybe, he's right. If Campbell is right, then the Wake is transformed from a fairly decent practical joke played on the academic community into a nightmare of pointless, wasted effort. His, Joyce's, yours, and mine.

I cannot bring myself to conclude that Campbell was fraudelent; he seems sincere. So, I simply hold out the hope that he was honestly mistaken in his assessment of the work. Of course, it would be impossible to say whether he was right or wrong--the Wake, like the inkblot in a Rorshach test, will accomodate the human need for pattern recognition by supplying almost any concievable image. There's no way to "prove" any interpretation of the Wake right, or any other interpretation wrong. I could just as easily say that it's a tale about the colonization of Mars. I bet you I could find good textual evidence for it, and then defy you to prove it wasn't so.

Campbell, bound and determined to come up with a coherent tale that fits Joyce's almost-words, indeed produces *something*, though it, itself, is only on the borderlands of the rational. But is that something what Joyce had in mind when he sat down? How would we ever know? Those who need to believe that "Joyce was a genius" because that's how they'll build up their own cultural cachet, will continue to believe it no matter what I say. But those who approach the Wake, or this purported exegisis of it, with an open mind will realize that, for thousands of years men claimed to find meaning in tea-leaves and sheep's entrails, and pictures in the stars, but those images and tales lie more in our own minds than in the entities themselves.

The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses

Average customer rating:

A Great Guide
A Miracle of Literary Criticism.
Highly Recommended (Except maybe if you want to become a Joyce Purist)
Avoid
very useful

The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses
Harry Blamires
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Writing | Reference | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

Ulysses
Ulysses Annotated
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)
James Joyce (Oxford Lives)
James Joyce's Ulysses

ASIN: 0415138574

Book Description

The New Bloomsday Book is a crystal clear, line by line running commentary on the plot of James Joyce's Ulysses which illuminates many symbolic themes and literary structures along the way.

Since 1966, readers new to James Joyce have depended upon this essential guide which makes this intimidating novel accessible. Designed to help the student and the general reader to find their way quickly about Joyce's formidable novel, The New Bloomsday Book will enable someone approaching Joyce for the first time to reach an understanding of the novel which otherwise might have taken several readings.

"It remains, the only commentary in which paraphrase is largely employed without detriment to one's sense of the interest of the novel." --Books Ireland

To ensure that Blamires' classic work will remain useful to new readers, this third edition contains the page numbering and references to the three most commonly read editions of Ulysses: the Gabler `Corrected Text' (1986) editions, the Oxford University Press `World Classics' (1993), and the Penguin `Twentieth-Century Classics (1992).

From the Preface: " Ulysses must not be made to appear more difficult than it is. Joyce's text is a highly organized one, and it only requires a little attention to the network of thematic linkages which undergirds the work to make the reader feel at home in Joyce's world." --Harry Blamires

Customer Reviews:

A Great Guide.......2007-02-12

I like the Bloomsday guide because it helps the reader understand Ulysses. It is good to see crossreferences and interpretations. He is very strong on religious symbolism, but Blamires helps get through the book Ulysses.

A Miracle of Literary Criticism. .......2007-01-08

This book is an excellent example--if not THE example--of why literary criticism exists; it is a concise but amazing classic. I was first introduced to it in college and today I just read it for the third time. Its pages enhance Ulysses and in no way detract from the art and beauty of the most complex and scholarly book ever published (in my humble opinion). Blamires is a serious man who wastes few words or sentences in his sterling discussion and recapitulation of Joyce's masterpiece. His narrative features extraordinary erudition, yet it is quite readable. Nowadays, most people are not familiar with the intricacies of Latin, Greek, and the symbols of Christianity, but Blamires makes such mysteries obtainable. The effect of his analysis is to magnify both our enjoyment and our education. Literary criticism, in this new millennium, seems to be about everything other than the text with its omnipresent, and opaque, references to the troika of class, gender, and race. Luckily, Blamires is above all forms of trendiness and non-sense. The Bloomsday Book brings us closer to the truths James Joyce meant for us to discover, and there is no better service with which the author could have provided.

Highly Recommended (Except maybe if you want to become a Joyce Purist).......2006-06-20

I took Ulysses as part of a course, and The New Bloomsday Book was a tremendous help in my enjoying Ulysses.

I read up to the Cyclops episode without Blamires, and, though I was basically comprehending the book, I was losing a lot of the significance of what I was reading.

My practice from there on in was to read the episode, read Blamires's guide for that episode, and then read the episode again - a bit tedious, you might think, but Joyce is all in the details and the repeated reading.

There are some arguments against having a guide: clearly, part of the reason for Joyce's style was to disorient the reader, to make the reader work, to make the reader give up the dream of total comprehension, of "licking up the cream of thought", to use the phrase of Joyce's protege, Beckett.

On the other hand, why torture yourself! If you read it concurrently with Ulysses, episode by episode, it really doesn't ruin anything plotwise (there's not much plot to speak of!), but it opens up a the world of significant details that otherwise might have passed you by.

I say Blamires accomplishes what he says he aims to do: to reveal the significance of details of Ulysses' on the first read that would normally only come to be seen on a second or third read through.

Avoid.......2005-06-10

A first reading of Ulysses is much more enjoyable without the blather of Blamires. If you absolutely cannot grasp the intricacies, sybmols, themes, etc. of Ulysses without outside help then read the cliffs notes of sparknotes or if you are devoted then get Gifford's Ulysses annotated. Blamires provides either too much information in some instances or not enough. The book has too much plot transcription and not enough GOOD (and up to date) analysis (he relies on readings of Ulysses by 1940s critics and not upon more recent scholarship and trends). Blamires tells toooooo much in the beginning. He prejudices the reader to think about or know certain things that he or she should only know as they are revealed by the author. For example, Blamires gives a bias to the reader by making him or her believe that Molly has been unfaithful many times before. Yes there is a list of former lovers in Ithaca (I think it's Ithaca) but most scholars believe that Molly's tryst with Blazes is her first. You don't need an "authority" to guide you through one of the greatest novels. Simply pick up Joyce and begin reading. To get the same effect of reading Ulysses with Blamires, just read Ulysses twice--it's much better the second time anyway!
(Another more pragmatic reason for not buying it is that the price of this book is at least double Ulysses--not worth the mostly hum-drum plot summary.)

very useful.......2005-05-12

This isn't exactly a work of criticism, and certainly not a "Cliff notes" guide to Ulysses: it's somewhere in the middle.

It's basically a paraphrase of Joyce's novel, roughly 260 pages, which tells the story of Bloomsday in plain language. So it's basically an understandable version of the novel in straightforward, unclouded prose.

It is not strictly a paraphrase, however, as now and then Blamires will tell you what is supposed to symbolize what. But it certainly doesn't list the characters or themes of "Ulysses" in any organized way, and there is no extended commentary.

Provided you understand this, the book can be immensely useful -- especially on your first reading of "Ulysses."

I should note that those who already have their sea legs with Joyce's book will, for this very reason, find Blamires's effort to be of limited use, for it largely tells a story you already know.

Reading Alcoholisms: Theorizing Character and Narrative in Selected Novels of Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf

Average customer rating:

An important book from a number of angles.

Reading Alcoholisms: Theorizing Character and Narrative in Selected Novels of Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf
Jane Lilienfeld
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

British | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0312217099

Book Description

With Reading Alcoholisms, Jane Lilienfeld has produced a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary study using the social, psychological, and scientific literature on alcoholism and family alcoholism to examine the novels of Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf. Each of these authors was directly affected by the alcoholism of a family member or mentor, and Lilienfeld shows how the effects of alcoholism organized their texts: through the portrayal of a protagonist in The Mayor of Casterbridge, through the denial of parental alcoholism and its silent presence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and through codependent reactive patterns of Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. With the remarkable empathy Lilienfeld has for human dimensions of alcoholism, she demonstrates that "the narrative strategies in each of these novels at times mimic the behaviors and feeling states often arising from alcoholism." Without an understanding of the multidimensional nature of alcoholism and the transmission of its effects across generations, any analysis of the work of these three literary giants is incomplete.

Customer Reviews:

An important book from a number of angles........1999-08-12

What Shays did for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in *Achilles in Vietnam,* Dr. Jane Lilienfeld does for alcoholism in her new book, *Reading Alcoholisms.* Lilienfeld's book reviews some familiar works of English literature dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries through the lens of what we have come to know about alcoholism, both the "disease process" itself and its somewhat predictable effects upon alcoholics, their families, and others close to them. At the time the works Lilienfeld focuses upon were written, there was no body of alcoholism theory; nevertheless, the authors of these works reproduced in painful detail what would later become familiar trajectories of personal and familial decline. One of the points Lilienfeld scores is to show that alcoholism as we understand it existed BEFORE we understood it. However crude and ineffective present treatments for them might be, alcoholism (and, by extension, other addictions) are hardly the iatrogenic diseases some occasionally claim. Lilienfeld allows her readers to think inductively about evidence in the texts. One might sometimes wish for her to validate our thinking by drawing more conclusions for us. But that's a small gripe. This is a fine book.

Average customer rating:

A REFERENCE book
Disappointing
okay
Great help
An Invaluable Tool For Making It Through The Wake

Annotations to Finnegans Wake
Roland McHugh
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Education | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0801883822

Book Description

Long considered the essential guide to Joyce's famously difficult work, Roland McHugh's Annotations to "Finnegans Wake" provides both novice readers and seasoned Joyceans with a wealth of information in an easy-to-use format uniquely suited to this densely layered text. Each page of the Annotations corresponds directly with a page of the standard Viking/Penguin edition of Finnegans Wake and contains line-by-line notes following the placement of the passages to which they refer. The reader can thus look directly from text to notes and back again, with no need to consult separate glossaries or other listings.

McHugh's richly detailed notes distill decades of scholarship, explicating foreign words, unusual English connotations and colloquial expressions, place names, historical events, song titles and quotations, parodies of other texts, and Joyce's diverse literary and popular sources. The third edition has added material reflecting fifteen years of research, including significant new insights from Joyce's compositional notebooks (the "Buffalo Notebooks"), now being edited for the first time.

Customer Reviews:

A REFERENCE book.......2004-03-27

This book is most helpful for pointing out the puns made in languages with which one is not familiar. It also helps with some of the historical and literary allusions. IT IS NOT A BOOK THAT IS A GUIDE TO READING FINNEGANS WAKE. That said, it is nevertheless invaluable as a reference book when reading the Wake.

Disappointing.......2002-12-04

Roland McHugh is an admirable Joyce scholar and most certainly knows more about the Wake than I, but I must say this book is not at all what I was looking for in an annotated guide. I was expecting the format of Ulysses Annotated, but instead was confronted with a very different mode of operation. McHugh's book is very useful in two areas, those being 1.)Foreign Words and 2.)Joyce's compound words. This is because the author presents the annotations as if they were personal notes in his own copy of the Wake, rather than full explications as found in Ulysses Annotated. McHugh argues that this will force the reader to make his own connections and lead to more frutiful conclusions, but the same goal could be accomplished by simply doing what McHugh has done, read FW, study it, and make notes of your own. Any beginner who is not familiar with some of the primary themes of the Wake will be sorely disappointed. The best example of the way McHugh skims over these is found in the preface (which I believe can be previewed on this site), where he shows how in a regular annotated guide a reference to Giambattista Vico would take up 9 lines of text, briefly explaining his theory, and in his own method it is simply referred to as 'Vico'. This reference would mean absolutely nothing to a reader unfamiliar with Vico. For a reader seeking to add a little convenience to their own personal study, this is perfect. For the reader seeking (relatively) full explanations of historical and literary allusions and such, this is most certainly not the guide to get. This book would have been exponentially more useful had it simply been integrated into the text of FW, ie one page of FW, one page of annotations.

okay.......2002-03-11

so many things he misses, so much obvious stuff he includes, and so little detail on the meaning of some of the annotations end up making this book somewhat of a nuisance, breaking up the flow which makes the Wake enjoyable. I still prefer Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to FW, though it admits that it does not try to catch every allusion. I find that most of the things that I really do want to find out, where I hear some echo of something, he doesn't touch on, or doesn't touch on to my satisfaction. Really, this project should be a collaboration online where people would add their comments to the possible meanings of different lines, because there are so many. Each man comes at it with his own knowledge, interests and needs, and can't get everything. So while this is useful for some, it's more of an impediment for me. A tattered security blanket that trips you up while you walk, you feel like Linus from peanuts lugging out this big blue thing.

Great help.......2000-08-03

The Annotations is a very helpful reference, pure and simple. Even for those familiar with the nightlife of the Wake, Annotations to Finnegans Wake invariably points out literary redlight districts that have escaped the reader's attention. This book is also simple to use - it is identically paginated to the Wake so there is no confusing looking for the right page. Etymology is provided where necessary, and there are the usual plethora of allusions. A quick review of this book before reading Joyce's Finnegans Wake considerably increases the percentage of puns, parodies, allusions, and portmanteau words you will understand while reading.

Not an absolute requirement for reading Finnegans Wake but doubtless a great help.

An Invaluable Tool For Making It Through The Wake.......1998-02-24

I found this book invaluable in studying Finnegans Wake. There is a brief introduction followed by a 1 to 1 mapping of each line and page of the Wake. I've found no other source with a better brief annotative structure that this one.

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