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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsVladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses
http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/vladimir-nabokov-creates-a-hand-drawn-map-of-james-joyces-ulysses.htmlThis is cool
Just above youll find a sketched-out map of the paths Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom took through Dublin on June 16, 1904. If youve ever read James Joyces Ulysses (find it in our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books), you may well have tried drawing one of these yourself, connecting the locations as each chapter finds one of the protagonists somewhere else in Irelands capital on that ordinary day. Maybe you wanted to test the plausibility of the common assertion that, given accuracy and detail with which Joyce wrote about the city, one could, in case of the apocalypse, build the city all over again using the novel as a plan. This particular Ulysses fan map, however, comes from the hand of a very special reader indeed: Vladimir Nabokov, author of a few much-discussed works of twentieth-century literature himself, including Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory.
For those who teach Ulysses, Nabokov has a suggestion: Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Blooms and Stephens intertwining itineraries clearly traced. A post from Raynor Ganan quotes him as saying that, adding, Would you not have donated a litre of your own spinal fluid to audit this lecture? Indeed, Nabokov speaks from experience, having not only produced well-respected literature but taught it, too. The fruits of his time at the front of the classroom appear in his collection Lectures on Literature, though if you want to get as close as possible to the experience of sitting in on one of Nabokovs classes, go back into our archives and watch the WQED dramatization, starring Christopher Plummer, of his talk on Kafka at Cornell. It wont give you any insight into Joyces Dublin, granted, but some Yale grad students more recent project to digitally, interactively map Ulysses just might.
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Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses (Original Post)
Recursion
Aug 2013
OP
UTUSN
(70,497 posts)1. thanks. this gave me more than i got in college. nt
manisa483
(1 post)2. wow ,is cool
wow ,is cool
greatauntoftriplets
(175,698 posts)3. Very interesting!
Looking at the map, I've been to a lot of those places without consciously tracing the path described in "Ulysses".