Purdue University North Central Assistant Professor of English Heather Fielding will be among 15 international scholars traveling to Dublin, Ireland to take part in the five-week seminar, "James Joyce's Ulysses: Text and Contexts" as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars and Institutes for College and University Teachers.
"Ulysses," is considered to be a landmark work of modern fiction, often considered one of the, if not the, best novel ever written. Joyce is considered to be one of the most significant, influential writers of the early 20th century. The seminar participants, who share an interest in Joyce, literary modernism, and Irish studies will immerse themselves in the novel "Ulysses" - visiting the actual locations for the novel and literally walking the streets that Joyce walked.
"Ulysses" focuses on a day - June 16, 1904 - in the life of a bunch of ordinary Dubliners. The novel centers on the meaning of the ordinary. Simple acts such as getting dressed in the morning become the site of an epic meditation on families, religion, colonialism, history, mythology.
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The novel is seen as a master work on several levels: it is an exploration of Irish culture at the beginning of the 20th century, it is an homage to the Ulysses of mythology and it is a remarkably funny and incisive book about language.
Fielding frequently teaches "Ulysses" in her classes. Thirty students read the first chapter in her English 241 last semester and she will offer an advanced seminar on "Ulysses" next spring.
As an undergraduate student, Fielding took a course on "Ulysses" and she describes it as "one of the most inspiring experiences of my time in college. There's something so exciting and rewarding about spending a semester reading and discussing one of the most challenging, moving books written in the English language. I want to share that with my students."