All Program Dates
October 26, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm ET
November 23, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm ET
December 14, 2025 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm ET
January 18, 2026 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm ET
February 15, 2026 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm ET
March 15, 2026 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm ET
April 12, 2026 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm ET
May 10, 2026 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm ET
May 31, 2026 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm ET
Registration
Tuition for this course is $450. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, August 22, for Rosenbach members on Friday, August 29, and for the general public on Friday, September 5. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET.
Description
James Joyce was one of the 20th century’s most complex, influential, paradoxical, irreverent, domineering, problematic, and rewarding writers; Ulysses (pub. 1922) is, if not Joyce’s most difficult work, certainly his most beloved and consequential one. This reading group aims to acquaint first-time readers with Ulysses and to give those already familiar with the novel the opportunity to deepen their engagement with it. Although I’ll begin most of our meetings with mini-lectures for the sake of framing and activating the day’s reading, the heart of our reading group will be our discussions.
Over the course of our nine monthly sessions together, we’ll try to sustain the high level of serious play—or “jocoseriousness,” as Joyce put it—that Ulysses itself exhibits. At the same time, we’ll be stopping at points to consider not only the strangeness of our own proceedings but also the massive network of professional coteries, publishing fiefdoms, feverish exegesis, literary estates, pop-cultural commodities, and mass-cultural references that together constitute the loose, baggy monster known as the “Joyce Industry.” We’ll talk about what else we’re doing when we read Joyce besides “simply reading Joyce.” And we’ll try to inhabit a wide range of attitudes—scrutiny, ambivalence, mastery, submission, neutral distance, resistance, indifference, bafflement, outrage, and besottedness—in respect to Joyce’s work, life, and legacy.
This in-person course meets monthly at the Rosenbach.
Sponsors
Reading Ulysses with Paul Saint-Amour is sponsored by Lenni H. Steiner and Perry A. Lerner.
Instructor
Paul Saint-Amour is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and a scholar of modernist and contemporary literature. The author, most recently, of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, he has served as President of the Modernist Studies Association and as a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation. Over the years Saint-Amour has taught courses at the Rosenbach on Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Modernist Short Fiction, and (with Megan Quigley) Reading 1922.