Joyce's biographer, Richard Ellmann, once remarked "we are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries." In Ulysses, Joyce turned to the well-known myth of a previous time in an effort to give shape to the much less obvious myths of his own time. Our primary question in this seminar will be: what did Joyce think he was doing in writing these stories and novels, how did that affect the way that he wrote them, and why did those narrative innovations become such a primary influence on the aesthetic of modernism? Joyce went out of his way, time and time again, to present himself as someone on a mission, someone who must not be stopped or Irish culture in particular, and World culture in general, would suffer. As we look at Joyce's fiction through the lenses of major theoretical approaches to in this seminar (psychoanalytic, feminist, post-colonial, Marxist, modernist — to name the most prominent), we will also maintain, throughout the course of the seminar, a keen interest in "the reality of experience" as Joyce would have witnessed it — the rise of advertising and commodity culture, as well as the birth of a new Art form: cinema.