Annotating Joyce’s Ulysses for the Internet

For 33 years John Hunt was a literature professor at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he chiefly taught Shakespeare and other writers of the English Renaissance. Later in his career he began offering classes in Joyce’s works, a passion that led to the creation of the Joyce Project, an online resource to aid readers of Ulysses as they read. This halfway-to-completion website offers edited versions of the novel’s eighteen chapters with embedded hyperlinks that allow readers to jump immediately to annotations that can help them make sense of the passages they are reading. The commentary is supplemented with abundant visual illustrations.

Professor Hunt will talk about the possibilities available to an annotator of Joyce who chooses to publish online rather than in print. His work builds on the labours of previously published scholars but employs a new format appropriate to the electronic medium. The structure he has devised allows annotations to become longer, to address multiple passages in the text, to accommodate multiple ways of reading passages, to supplement objective presentation of information with subjective description of artistic effects, to engage with the non-linear, cross-referential structures that Joyce built into his book, and to speak effectively both to first-time readers of the novel and to more experienced Joyceans. Hunt will detail the logic behind his form of commentary and look at a few examples on the website. At the end of his prepared remarks there will be time for questions and discussion.