{"id":132187,"date":"2019-01-01T09:00:50","date_gmt":"2019-01-01T14:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132187"},"modified":"2023-09-19T11:57:45","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T15:57:45","slug":"are-we-all-joyceans-here-then-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/01\/are-we-all-joyceans-here-then-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Are We All Joyceans Here, Then?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 2, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday!<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of Ulysses<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cAre we all Joyceans here, then?\u201d the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway.<\/p>\n

We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses<\/em> seminar that met at six thirty P.M.<\/small> on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But to call us \u201cJoyceans\u201d seemed like a stretch. Today\u2014Thursday, January 29, 2015\u2014was only the first day. And besides, this was City College.<\/p>\n

No article about City College is complete without the obligatory phrase \u201cthe Harvard of the proletariat,\u201d which was supposedly both our school\u2019s nickname and its reputation in the mid twentieth\u00a0century. By 2015, however, no one could deny that our beautiful Harlem campus was in decline. Governor Cuomo had recently slashed the budget for the entire CUNY<\/small> system, with City College bearing the brunt of the cuts, and the disastrousness of this decision is difficult to convey without resorting to sodomitic imagery. That year, classrooms were so overcrowded that latecomers had to sit on the floor. One of my professors entered his office on the first day to find that his entire desk had been stolen. The humanities building still used old-fashioned blackboards, but the budget didn\u2019t provide for chalk, so professors hoarded and traded it like prison cigarettes. Most bathroom stalls didn\u2019t lock, and for several weeks, the entire campus collectively ran out of toilet paper\u2014I\u2019ll never forget the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2015 and the generosity it inspired in my fellow students, who shared their own toilet paper from home and never stooped to charging for it.<\/p>\n

It was in this context that the English department decided to offer its first-ever Ulysses<\/em> seminar, though they offered it as you might offer someone a home-cooked meal that you\u2019re secretly pretty sure contains broken glass. \u201cNB: This is a highly demanding course with a heavy reading load<\/em><\/strong>,\u201d the course catalogue warned in bold italics, \u201cmore like a graduate seminar than a 400-level college class.<\/em><\/strong>\u201d I don\u2019t think it actually said \u201cDON\u2019T TAKE THIS CLASS<\/em><\/strong>,\u201d but that was the obvious implication. I have since learned that our idealistic young professor was met with departmental resistance when he suggested a Ulysses<\/em> seminar, and I now suspect that the department was half hoping no one would register for it at all.<\/p>\n

Read more >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 2, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! \u201cAre we all Joyceans here, then?\u201d the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway. We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses seminar that met at six thirty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44292],"tags":[2672,34383,947,34382,946],"class_list":["post-132187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2018","tag-bloomsday","tag-city-college-of-new-york","tag-james-joyce","tag-joyceans","tag-ulysses"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAre We All Joyceans Here, Then?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We had read \u2018Ulysses.\u2019 For the rest of our lives, we would be people who had read \u2018Ulysses.\u2019\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/01\/are-we-all-joyceans-here-then-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Are We All Joyceans Here, Then? by James Frankie Thomas\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 1, 2019 \u2013 We\u2019re away until January 2, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. 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