“Joyce’s, Ulysses: A Human Work for Humans”
led by Claudia Traudt POSTPONED DUE TO ILLNESS
EMAIL INFO@KIBBITZNEST.ORG to reserve your spot
James Joyce's Ulysses IS a human book for humans. It is also, straight up groundbreaking, foundational, very challenging, funny, and piercing. Joyce wrote it as eighteen untitled episodes, which in two schemas, he created; he evocatively associates with Homer's Odyssey. In Ulysses, we journey 'round Dublin’ on one day - June 16, 1904 (actually 19 - 20 hours - though an eternity the Linati schema suggests) for 783 pages. Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom are our focal trio - echoing Telemachus, Odysseus, and Penelope. Vivid and many characters - consequential and fleeting – they interact. Action, utterance, and interior monologue, objects, memory's assertiveness, intriguing narratives, near-cinematic renderings achieve the whole, WITH our imaginative participation.
We shall savor a sampling of these humans doing human things, and Joyce's language incarnating them. Buck Mulligan making jibes at dour mourning-clad housemate; Stephen Dedalus, on, in and around the Sandymount Martello tower; the morning with Leopold and Molly Bloom; a funeral's doings and dreamings; the windiness of a newspaper hall, a cataclysmic, cyclopian confrontation in Barney Kiernan's Pub; a beachfront climax at thirty paces; a brothel district interlude, both concrete and phantasmagoric; a rescue; a dialogue and catechetical inquiry; an intimate awakening and a falling to sleep. And an ultimate Yes.
Claudia Traudt holds a BFA in painting from Saint Mary’s College at Notre Dame & an MA from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where she focused on literature & did dissertation work on Shakespeare, Joyce, & Yeats. She also immersed in aesthetics & art history at Washington University in St. Louis. She joined the Basic Program as an instructor in 1982 & served as Staff Chair from 1991 – 1995. She teaches across the curriculum, from Plato to Woolf, & offers regular summer & alumni classes on poetry, Joyce, & Faulkner, in addition to seminars on Stoppard, the fine arts, Melville, Yeats, Toni Morrison, & many others. Claudia also taught in the arts and humanities for Columbia College Chicago. She is the 2006 recipient of the Graham School’s Excellence in Teaching Award for the Basic Program.
Photo Credit: Marilyn reading Joyce, 1955, Eve Arnold, Time Magazine
The Kibbitznest Liberal Arts Discussion Series is a collaboration primarily with the University of Chicago Graham School where we invite faculty and instructors to present and discuss their original research. In keeping with the mission to promote face to face communication, we encourage the audience to ask questions as prompted by the instructor. The discussion will end at approximately 7:15-7:30 at which point you are free to leave. You can also go ahead and gather at a table if you would like to discuss the topic further.
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