Ulysses

»It is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.« | T. S. Eliot

How can a novel from 1922 still feel more modern than almost everything printed today?

The events in James Joyce's Ulysses unfold over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904. Every home, street, public space in Dublin; the city's memories, emotions, desires - the author wanted to capture it all. Each episode, and its central characters, also corresponds to those in the most famous literary work from the dawn of our civilization, Homer's Odyssey. Joyce argued that the roles of language in reality are more than just direct communication. We have control over language and yet no control over its vast flow through us. The novel's shifts in voice and style - revelry, solemnity, spirituality, lust, hunger, anxiety, ecstatic elation - encompass men and women, young and old. Inner monologue becomes spiritual dialogue, and there's a collage of literary history and everyday languages. Through the homage to Homer, everything is connected in a mythical cycle.

JAMES JOYCE [1882-1941], Irish author, is a key figure in modernist literature with works such as Dubliners [1914], A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], and Ulysses [1922].