Ulysses depicts a world that is as fully conceived and vibrant as anything in Homer or Shakespeare. It has been delighting and puzzling readers since it was first published on Joyce's 40th birthday in 1922. And here, Professor Heffernan maps the brilliance, passion, humanity, and humor of Joyce's modern Odyssey in these 24 lectures that finally make a beguiling literary masterpiece accessible for anyone willing to give it a chance. Although they discuss selected points from the enormous body of critical scholarship on Ulysses, these lectures presuppose no special knowledge of literature or of James Joyce. Whether or not you've read Ulysses, you'll find they make an excellent guide to the many-layered pleasures of this modern epic. Illuminating the dramatic and artistic integrity behind the novel's most notoriously challenging passages, they explain why this frank, path-breaking novel was praised as a landmark and damned as obscene - even banned - as soon as it first appeared. You'll come to see Ulysses as many books at once: an inspired modern reweaving of the fabric of Homer's mighty Odyssey; a supreme synthesis of realism and symbolism; a grandly comic and at times bawdy work - a seriocomic parable about art and experience; a symphonic, kaleidoscopic portrayal of the sights, sounds, and voices of Dublin and every city; and a dazzling work of masterfully handled prose styles and narrative devices.

Above all, you'll learn to read Ulysses as an unsentimental but deeply felt story that uses concrete facts of mundane life in a particular time and place to say something truly extraordinary and universal that speaks to all that is human in us.