Bloomsday in Seoul - James Joyce’s Ulysses and the East Asian Classroom

Abstract

For admirers of James Joyce, June 16 is Bloomsday, the single day in 1904 immortalized in his epic novel Ulysses. Well known for its difficulty and elaborate formal experimentation, the novel continues to present formidable challenges for undergraduate students throughout the English-speaking world; in an international liberal arts college in Korea, effectively teaching this high modernist text, with its almost encyclopedic recalibration of the Western tradition, might appear to be nearly impossible. After reading Ulysses with a group of international and Korean students over the course of a semester, however, I argue here for the value of this learning experience, particularly in terms of the ways in which close and attentive reading of the novel gives rise to larger epistemological and ethical questions. On the one hand, Ulysses, through its many innovative literary devices, self-consciously lays bare and draws into question the processes and forms through which we make meaning, the ways in which we frame, order, and interpret our experiences. On the other hand, its nuanced portrayals of bigotry, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, and Irish nationalism have the capacity to activate in students a critical ethical thinking, one receptive to the notion that a vast amount of human suffering and injustice is rooted in politics and ideologies of exclusion. Pedagogically speaking, perhaps Ulysses’s chief virtue lies in its enduring ability to shock students out of habitual modes of reading and thinking, experiencing these disruptions as an invitation to critically interrogate violence, hegemony, and servitude in all their visible, and less-visible, forms.