[SOLD OUT] Reading Ulysses with Michael Barsanti

• Tuition for this course is $450. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more. 

• This course is limited to participants who are 18 years of age or older. 

• Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email [email protected]. 

• Registration opens for everyone on Bloomsday, June 16, 2024.  

This course has now filled, but we will be offering a weekly online Ulysses course in February 2025.

Description 

To read James Joyce’s masterpiece together and have fun doing it, with freewheeling discussion, amusing and brief digressions, penetrating insights, mind-opening questions, and occasional singing.  We will be aided primarily by the shared insights and observations of the group, facilitated by my own experiences and interpretations, solicited and unsolicited. And we will have the benefit of the Rosenbach’s collection, particularly the manuscript of Ulysses, to serve as a guide and inspiration.   

On top of all this, we will add a layer of ‘place,’ meaning that we will add a particular focus on the places Joyce lived while he was writing Ulysses, and how those places may have influenced the subjects and styles of his writing. By doing this we will be deliberately working in tension with the natural tendency to focus on Dublin as the subject of Ulysses, but also invoking the Ulyssean concept of ‘parallax’ – viewing an object from two perspectives to find its real location. 

This course will also feature a presentation of materials from the Rosenbach’s Joyce collection, including portions of the Ulysses manuscript. All participants will have the opportunity to read at our annual Bloomsday Festival in 2025.   

 Reading Syllabus

About the Instructor 

Dr. Michael Barsanti has been reading, thinking, and talking about James Joyce for a very long time. His obsession began with a high-school class that gave him his first chance to read Ulysses back in 1986, and has carried forward ever since then through undergraduate and graduate degrees, and even a stint at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, where he curated the “Ulysses in Hand” exhibition in 1998.  His favorite Joyce projects have been those that have connected non-academic ‘civilians’ to Joyce’s work, especially the *Ulysses Seen* online graphic adaptation created by Robert Berry that he collaborated on in the 2000s. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, a M.A. from the University of Miami, and a B.A. from Williams College. Dr. Barsanti lives in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia with his wife, Erin Mooney, and their three children.