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EDNOTE. This Bloomsday interview with Zoran Kuzmanovich, editor of NABOKOV STUDIES, appeared in the _Charlotte Observer_. Please note that the paper name is not a coded reference to Lolita's mother.
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/living/food/8933331.htm?1c
Posted on Wed, Jun. 16, 2004
June 16, 1904: A Dublin day
Charlotte Observer (subscription), NC - Jun 16, 2004
... Q. Do you teach "Ulysses" at Davidson? If so, how do students respond to it? I teach it only in the seminar on Joyce and Nabokov. ...
June 16, 1904: A Dublin day
Joyce made the date famous in `Ulysses,' and today marks the 100th anniversary
SAM HODGES
Book Editor
James Joyce's famous (and famously difficult) novel "Ulysses" follows Leopold Bloom as he makes his way around Dublin on June 16, 1904. Other key characters are his unfaithful wife, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, a young writer Bloom befriends and tries to protect.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the date explored so fully in "Ulysses." Thus the timing is right for a discussion of the novel with Joyce enthusiast Zoran Kuzmanovich of Davidson College's English Department.
Q. Why is "Ulysses" a great book? Joyce's readers who finish the book feel as if they had dropped in for one day into Dublin of 1904. Joyce's mixed-mode narration makes us all eavesdrop on three isolated, frustrated, grieving but talented people united by the most common and interdependent desires I know of: to touch someone and be touched in turn and to feel at home somewhere.
Joyce had loosely plotted "Ulysses" after Homer's "Odyssey," but because the book refuses to provide simple answers to questions raised by deeply felt love, memory, death and art, readers have to supply their versions of the ending. The book demands an open reading; that is, it requires readers to put together on their own the most satisfactory map of the ways the lives of these three major characters intersect.
Q. Joyce struggled to get it published, right? Eleven years passed between the end of its serial publication in a small literary magazine (put out by English-speaking expatriates in France) and its publication in the U.S. in 1933.
Q. When did you first read it, and how many times have you read it? I read it as a sophomore in college (University of Wisconsin) for Florenze Walzl, an ex-nun. I have re-read it some dozen or more times.
Q. Do you teach "Ulysses" at Davidson? If so, how do students respond to it? I teach it only in the seminar on Joyce and Nabokov. Students who make it past the first six chapters realize that it is one of the funniest books ever written.
Q. Don't you also have a public reading of "Ulysses" on campus? When do you do it, and how long does it take? In the same seminar we do read the book start to finish in one sitting; it's become something of a ritual of community-building and intellectual hazing that students look forward to surviving and talking about for years to come.
Joyce's words have an energy and body to them few other writers have managed to harness. Because we are not in school during June, we usually read it six weeks into the semester, after reading Joyce's earlier books -- "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." The readings have ranged from 24 to 36 hours. Because the first reading became something of a media circus, we have stopped publicizing it.
Q. What advice would you give to the reader who plans to take on "Ulysses" this summer? Take a few pages a day, or push on fast? Use a study guide or fly solo? One cannot really read Joyce fast, but students tell me that they find the last two thirds of the book both touching and hilarious, especially parody delivered through stream of consciousness narration. It also helps to have read at least "A Portrait of the Artist." Unless one has to produce a scholarly paper, flying solo has its own rewards.
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/living/food/8933331.htm?1c
Posted on Wed, Jun. 16, 2004
June 16, 1904: A Dublin day
Charlotte Observer (subscription), NC - Jun 16, 2004
... Q. Do you teach "Ulysses" at Davidson? If so, how do students respond to it? I teach it only in the seminar on Joyce and Nabokov. ...
June 16, 1904: A Dublin day
Joyce made the date famous in `Ulysses,' and today marks the 100th anniversary
SAM HODGES
Book Editor
James Joyce's famous (and famously difficult) novel "Ulysses" follows Leopold Bloom as he makes his way around Dublin on June 16, 1904. Other key characters are his unfaithful wife, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, a young writer Bloom befriends and tries to protect.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the date explored so fully in "Ulysses." Thus the timing is right for a discussion of the novel with Joyce enthusiast Zoran Kuzmanovich of Davidson College's English Department.
Q. Why is "Ulysses" a great book? Joyce's readers who finish the book feel as if they had dropped in for one day into Dublin of 1904. Joyce's mixed-mode narration makes us all eavesdrop on three isolated, frustrated, grieving but talented people united by the most common and interdependent desires I know of: to touch someone and be touched in turn and to feel at home somewhere.
Joyce had loosely plotted "Ulysses" after Homer's "Odyssey," but because the book refuses to provide simple answers to questions raised by deeply felt love, memory, death and art, readers have to supply their versions of the ending. The book demands an open reading; that is, it requires readers to put together on their own the most satisfactory map of the ways the lives of these three major characters intersect.
Q. Joyce struggled to get it published, right? Eleven years passed between the end of its serial publication in a small literary magazine (put out by English-speaking expatriates in France) and its publication in the U.S. in 1933.
Q. When did you first read it, and how many times have you read it? I read it as a sophomore in college (University of Wisconsin) for Florenze Walzl, an ex-nun. I have re-read it some dozen or more times.
Q. Do you teach "Ulysses" at Davidson? If so, how do students respond to it? I teach it only in the seminar on Joyce and Nabokov. Students who make it past the first six chapters realize that it is one of the funniest books ever written.
Q. Don't you also have a public reading of "Ulysses" on campus? When do you do it, and how long does it take? In the same seminar we do read the book start to finish in one sitting; it's become something of a ritual of community-building and intellectual hazing that students look forward to surviving and talking about for years to come.
Joyce's words have an energy and body to them few other writers have managed to harness. Because we are not in school during June, we usually read it six weeks into the semester, after reading Joyce's earlier books -- "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." The readings have ranged from 24 to 36 hours. Because the first reading became something of a media circus, we have stopped publicizing it.
Q. What advice would you give to the reader who plans to take on "Ulysses" this summer? Take a few pages a day, or push on fast? Use a study guide or fly solo? One cannot really read Joyce fast, but students tell me that they find the last two thirds of the book both touching and hilarious, especially parody delivered through stream of consciousness narration. It also helps to have read at least "A Portrait of the Artist." Unless one has to produce a scholarly paper, flying solo has its own rewards.