Next year James Joyce’s iconic novel Ulysses will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of its publication. It is a book that is notoriously difficult to read for some. Currently, artist and educator Robert Berry is gearing up to teach an 18-week course on the novel called “A Pint of Ulysses.” The name is derived from the fact that each class comes out to be about the same price as a pint of Guinness.
“We intentionally made it just a very low cost, like 180 bucks for 18 weeks, and made it sort of the price of a couple of pints,” Berry says.
Anyone interested in taking the course can expect to hear from a wide range of guests.
“We want to extend that talk that we have in conversations in the classroom, out to a broader audience of people who are wondering about this book, but haven’t taken the class,” Berry says. “And to do that, I know a network of Joyce scholars and people who put on Bloomsday events, and just what I like to refer to as Joyce-heads, all over the world. And so I’ll have them in, in conversation with me in the class every Thursday.”
Those who have always wanted to read Ulysses but think of it as a daunting task are not alone. Berry has compared the novel to the X-Games of Western Literature, “and there’s nothing really wrong with that. But everybody who reads it, I don’t know, too many people read it and say, ‘Okay, I’m done with that.’ There are so many puzzles and things that they solve in it. I couldn’t tell you all the answers. They don’t exist. But you solve these kinds of puzzles, and you want to share them with other people.”
Berry estimates that he’s taught the novel six or seven times before, but he admits he had trouble reading through the entire book the first time, “Really, it took me five times to finish the novel.” Berry remarks upon the novel’s themes of isolation, otherness, and what it’s like to navigate a modern city. It makes sense then that the first time he actually made it through the novel was while he was painting in Florence. “I found a copy of that in a bookstore, and wanted to go down that rabbit hole, because I didn’t really speak Italian,” Berry says. “And I wanted that kind of language of jokes that’s unique to some of Joyce and I loved it.”
Ulysses has been a part of Rob Berry’s life ever since. Berry decided to use his skills as a cartoonist to adapt Ulysses into a graphic novel titled Ulysses Seen. He has continued his work in helping people to understand Ulysses in previous classes he has taught.
“Now, what happened was last year, I was teaching it for the Rosenbach Museum, during COVID,” he says. “And the first time we tried to do that, I made 60 small video lectures to accompany the course, so none of them are longer than about 11 minutes.”
Many would assume that teaching such a difficult book through virtual learning would be much harder than an in-person class, but Berry was surprised at how well the online course went. “With the students being able to encounter the lectures and have a discussion thread over Google Classroom, they were much more engaged,” Berry explains. “And then by the time we were able to get to our actual classroom meetings over Zoom, they weren’t lecture meetings. We were all talking about what we read or experienced through the book. This was one of the best groups that we had. Now, don’t get me wrong, I teach at the University of Pennsylvania, and there’s a lot of really smart kids at the University of Pennsylvania. But it’s a lot more rare to find that in situations where people are taking a course like this casually. People are taking it just because they really want to experience the book, or they want to experience it again and again.”
The upcoming “Pint of Ulysses” course is a great resource for people who are new to Joyce, but will also be rewarding for people who have read the book before and want to return to it.
“We’re going to have a lot more people who are really trying to help one another along through the ability of reading the book,” Berry says. “But that being said, some of the people who have signed up for this class are actually people who were in my Rosenbach class not that long ago, and just want to take it again. There’s a community to this book and it’s actually a lot more welcoming than people think.”
To sign up for the course, you can send an interest e-mail to pintofulysses@gmail.com or you can find them on Twitter, Facebook, and Patreon at the following links:
twitter.com/pintofulysses
facebook.com/pintofulysses
patreon.com/pintofulysses
