Courses

To view course offerings by semester, please use Class Search. Here are the courses for the upcoming fall 2026 semester. 

Below are some recently offered graduate courses:

ENGL 90257 – Shakespeare: Editing & Performance

You pick up a copy of Shakespeare - but what is the object you are holding? This course will explore the history, theory and practice of editing Shakespeare as an example of the complex issues in editing literary/dramatic texts. From the work of early modern printers, through the tradition of 18th century editions (Rowe to Malone), towards current, 21st century editorial practice and the future of online/print editions, we will investigate how practice has shaped theory and vice versa. In particular, we will be concerned with the problematics of the representation of performance (early, recent, possible) in text/paratext/commentary. Work required will include editing segments of Shakespeare plays (generating text, collation, commentary), attending performance(s) as well as experimenting with possible new ways in which a Shakespeare edition might be conceived and, of course, writing a substantial research paper.

ENGL 90528 – The Atlantic World: Literature and Theatre, 1688-Present

The transatlantic slave trade transformed the society, culture, economics, and politics of the early modern world; the disbursement of peoples of African descent during this period continues to impact the world that we live in today. In this course, we will explore the formation of an “Atlantic World,” by focusing on literature and theatre from the seventeenth-century to the present. Positioning the Atlantic Ocean as a conduit of exchange between the Old World and the colonized New World, the art of our focus will allow us to examine the results of these exchanges. While our initial focus will center on the creation of the Black Atlantic, our discussions and texts will include work written by a range of writers from around the Atlantic.

ENGL 90690 – Sound & Social Reproduction

This graduate seminar will attend to U.S. literature from the late 19th century through the present with focus on literary and sonic registers of social and sound reproduction, performance, and gender and sexuality, and the interrelations among these. Beginning in the 1890s, immense changes took place in the ways Americans conceptualized gender and sexuality; at the same time, recording sound and playing it back transformed from a fantasy to a novelty to a common practice. While these sets of changes might initially seem disparate, they both have questions of reproduction—biological reproduction, social reproduction, mechanical reproduction—at their core. How did these rapidly changing conceptions of reproduction—along with co-constitutive conceptions of race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality—shape the concerns and forms taken up by American literature in the late 19th and 20th centuries? To address these questions, in this seminar we will read fiction by authors such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jessie Fauset, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Gayl Jones, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Thomas Pynchon, and Edith Wharton, alongside readings in sound and performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies generally, including work by Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Michael Gallope, Saidiya Hartman, Stuart Hall, Christopher Looby, Heather Love, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Hortense Spillers.

ENGL 90277 – Medieval Romance

We will begin with ancient precursors to medieval romance and then track the development of the genre through key Arabic, French, and English sources. All texts will be available in English. We'll start with Xenophon and the earliest Alexander romances, then move on to parts of the Thousand and One Nights, literature from the Layla and Majnun tradition, Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Sir Orfeo, Floris and Blancheflour, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, among others.

ENGL 90412 – Gender, Print Culture, and Modernity

At the center of this course will be the complex and varied periodical cultures of modernity: little magazines that advanced literary and artistic experiments, “slicks” and fashion magazines that advertised a modern lifestyle, feminist papers, women’s and men’s magazines, and more. Topics may include the role of the feminist periodical press in advancing a counter public sphere; the role of the little magazines such the Little Review and the New Freewoman in entwining questions of literary experiment with the cultivation of new identity categories for modern (‘advanced’) women and men; the role of popular magazines in circulating a “pulp modernism” marked as masculine; the circulation of a queer modernity in the pages of British Vogue during the early 1920s. We’ll also consider literary representations of women’s encounters with new information systems: novels of the “typewriter girls” of modernity or new woman novels of encounter with the new journalism.

ENGL 90726 – Race, Law & Utopia in Atlantic America

How are the problems of race and gender intertwined, and how is/has the body been imagined in and through them? What can such questions tell us about today’s racial and gendered realities, both inside and outside of the university, both in the past and the present? This course takes a step backward to investigate these and other like questions in the context of what can be called the literary utopic impulse and its emphasis on the imagination in several 19th-century American authors whose work participates in a broad yet under-acknowledged vision of race, gender and Atlantic modernity. Grounding our analysis in a number of 16th-, 17th- and 18th--century political philosophical texts on law and utopia and drawing on the theories of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida and others in addition to insights from critical race theory, gender studies, feminist theory, theories of law and literature, and utopian studies, our goal will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of our racialized past and its troubled link to questions of gender both then and now, so that we may better hope to imagine—and reimagine—the shape of our collective democratic future in the 21st century’s global community.

ENGL 90782 – #EPIC: The American Long Poem from Walt Whitman to the World Wide Web

In this seminar, we will explore the diverse approaches U. S. American poets in the modern and contemporary periods have taken to innovate, radicalize, and deviate from the tradition of the epic. Moving from the instantiation of the modernist American long poem with the 1855 publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—wherein the epic hero is supplanted by the multitudinous and libidinal lyric “I,” operating on a scale hitherto unseen—to its embrace as a mode of literary experimentation in the 20th century to the invigoration (and explosion) of the form coinciding with the advent of the Internet and globalization, we will survey a changing panorama of American verse, pitched to #EPIC proportions. Authors on our syllabus will likely include Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Melvin Tolson, William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Lyn Hejinian, James Merrill, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Ronald Johnson, Claudia Rankine, Tommy Pico, Layli Long Soldier, and Robert Glück.

ENGL 90474 – Gothic

This course traces the Gothic across a range of genres in British and American literature from the 18th to the 19th century. Gothic is a distinctive lens through which to view literature’s preoccupation with social, psychological, political, scientific, and moral issues. Key topics will include: Gothic spaces, aesthetics, madness, the uncanny, monsters and revenants. The course will include poetry, drama, short fiction and novels.

ENGL 90950 – Introduction to Postcolonial Literature and Theory

The disciplinary formation that now bears the name of “global anglophone literatures” has a divergent and itinerant genealogy, drawing from the radical interventions of colonial discourse analysis, the critique of political economy, and postcolonial theory, as well as the more formalist and aestheticist insights of weltliteratur, narrative theory, and comparative literary studies. This course will try to trace these lineages and narrate a history of the field so as to identify where and how it is best equipped to address pressing contemporary issues of literary and cultural criticism. As the twenty-first century wears on, the models of literary production and consumption that earlier critical methods took for granted cease to describe the world; the internal coherence and territorial boundedness of national public spheres has become an increasingly quaint presupposition, cross-cultural encounters are more the rule than the exception, and literary production becomes more similar than different across national boundaries. What tools do we have at hand to work with the uneven ubiquity of “global literatures”? What does this object have in common with the transnational literature of early twentieth century modernism, or the postcolonial literature that was birthed out of it? Are existing methods of aesthetic, political, or historical analysis up to the task of interpreting this object? And what do we understand that literary, literary-critical, and theoretical task to be? We will read seminal works in the fields of postcolonial theory and world literature by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Emily Apter, Roberto Schwarz, Nirvana Tanoukhi, and Achille Mbembe, amongst others. The course will introduce students to the most pertinent and most recent debates in the fields of postcolonial-, world-, and global anglophone literatures.

ENGL 90140 – Reading the Novella

The novella is in its Golden Age, enjoying the attention of major publishers, spawning popular book series, and drawing the attention of readers as the form best suited to our contemporary habits of reading. But what is it about the form, and its history, that informs its current ascendancy in reading culture? In this course we will read across the contemporary novella and several key texts from its history. At stake will be questions of form and how we read, and we will place these texts in conversation with contemporary literary journalism, studies of narrative, and media theory. Our classes will often pair novellas together in conversation, and will also engage in experiments in how much time and attention novellas require.

ENGL 90271 – The (Un)Natural World in Medieval Literature

Can we get ‘back to nature' by going back in time? Did medieval people perceive and represent their physical environments in ways radically different to ours? When did ‘nature' divorce from ‘culture' and why? How do ‘pre-scientific' communities think the world works? Can we blame René Descartes for our alienation from the world that should nurture us? Or was feudalism at fault? Or Christianity? In this course, we'll attempt to answer these questions (and many more) through a cross-cultural investigation of the nature of ‘nature' in medieval literatures of the North Sea region. Informed by readings of ecocritical theory, we will attempt to navigate worldviews of medieval texts as they react to (and thereby conceive of and produce) space and place, landscape, the non-human, the inexplicable and uncanny, in the most mundane and most exotic surroundings: the worlds that medieval people called home and the worlds they created for themselves. This class will be seminar-based and student-led: students will be required to introduce primary texts to the group and will be called upon to lead off discussion when their text comes up in the schedule. The geographical and temporal scope is flexible, but we will potentially be looking at texts in Old English, Old Norse, Anglo-Norman and early Middle English, as well as Latin of different periods and a bit of medieval Welsh and Irish. All texts will be available in translation, although students will be encouraged to bring their linguistic expertise to bear on original texts wherever possible. Medievalists of all backgrounds are welcome—not just literary scholars.

ENGL 90798 – Postcolonial Anthropocene

Catastrophic global climate change presents intractable challenges to global politics, inherited notions of human progress and possibility, privileged Enlightenment understandings of freedom and liberation, and the very idea of literary narrative as it has emerged in imperial fossil fuel culture. This seminar will explore the predicament of the postcolonial anthropocene through scientific, historical, theoretical, and literary approaches, with special attention to the relationship between literacy and extractive capitalism. Readings may include work by David Abram, Aime Cesaire, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Silvia Frederici, Amitav Ghosh, Hans Jonas, Achille Mbembe, Carolyn Merchant, Peter Sloterdijk, and Sylvia Wynter.

ENGL 90190 – Returns of the Aesthetic

The field of literary studies has recently seen a return of interest in the aesthetic, traditionally defined as the realm of beauty detached from the concerns of everyday life, but now coming into focus as a mode of experience that develops individual and collective capacities, including for social and political critique. Representative titles include Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature (2015), Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), and Deepika Bahri’s Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (2003). This seminar examines such returns to the aesthetic in theory and criticism while also addressing the returns (or gains) of the aesthetic for literary study today. Readings and discussion will be divided into four main units: a first on foundational treatments of aesthetics in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary theory and philosophy; a second on the adaptation of such theories in the early twentieth century, notably as part of the methodology of close reading that came to define academic literary studies in the United States and Britain; a third on the uptake and critique of aesthetically oriented methodologies in the mid- to late twentieth century; and a fourth on the past several decades’ attempts to revive and redefine aesthetic concerns and criticism. Students will be invited to engage critically with the seminar material while reflecting on its returns for their own work.

ENGL 90115 – Queer Migrations

In this course, we will examine the intersections of migration with LGBTQ* identities. We will begin with James Baldwin’s Another Country (1961) and explore the ways that migration and movement (in multiple senses), as seemingly fundamental aspects of queer identity, further intersect with race, ethnicity, and gender. Throughout the course, we will be asking—and responding to—several questions, such as: How is the idea of home, as space and place, explored by LGBTQ* writers? Is migration a necessary paradigm for thinking of and through the LGBTQ* community? How have cities been shaped by queer identities? How is migration expressed through textual form in LGBTQ* texts? How do race and ethnicity intersect with gender and sexuality? This is an interdisciplinary course with a bit of an international focus. Because this course works through a range of film and literature, we will be discussing various formal strategies and methods used by each medium, and how these textual qualities map onto and explore content. We will be concerned with “movement” as a paradigm, and as such, will examine how movement is conveyed in film and literature, especially in regards to LGBTQ* identities.

ENGL 90131 – Don't Believe the Hype: Debut

In the literary world, the debut is given great emphasis. So much so that the debut author often feels an exorbitant amount of pressure to succeed with one book. In this course we will analyze and critique this construct by reading a range of diverse writers spanning the 20th and 21st century. We will problematize the industry obsession with new talent, and explore productive ways of managing these external pressures. Students will also generate work using in-class prompts in order to further develop their authorial voice.

ENGL 90013 – Graduate Fiction Workshop

A fiction workshop for graduate students in the MFA in Creative Writing program, with an emphasis on students developing their own aesthetic and personal vision, juxtaposed to and within the larger movement of the contemporary literary world.

ENGL 90038 – Graduate Poetry Workshop

Our goal in this class is to lock in on our vision for our own writing and help others to lock in on theirs. We will do this by reading widely and diversely and thinking about the aesthetic, occult, and political powers of poetry in our contemporary and pre-contemporary publishing universes. We will read across cultures and languages with an open and receptive ear, eye, heart and brain, ready to be changed by poetry. We will think about poetry as a medium among media and we will test our ideas by encountering texts and artworks that we do not normally think of as poetry at all.

ENGL 90270 – Seventeenth Century Women Writers

The seventeenth century in Old and New England saw an exciting and unprecedented flourishing of writing by women. This course looks at a rich and diverse range of women's writing, primarily from the second half of the century. Genres to be read and discussed include autobiography, letters, recipe books, poetry, fictional and non-fictional prose, and private and public drama. Authors include such now well-known figures as Aemilia Lanyer, Lady Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, and Aphra Behn. Primary texts will be read and discussed in biographical and historical context, alongside literary scholarship setting out current critical interests and debates. Among the questions to be addressed: How do women fashion themselves in and through their writing? How do gender concerns intersect with class, religion, politics, and race? How do early women writers use and boldly revise different literary forms?

ENGL 90791 – Sci/Fi: About Worlds Old & New

This graduate seminar brings together two subfields of inquiry—science fiction studies and the inscriptional studies of science and technology—and two questions—how is science written in fiction and how is writing used in science—to account for the ways in which writing and science are, and have been historically and culturally, entangled. No prior knowledge of any subfield is required. You will read and engage with scholarship from literary criticism, history of science, science studies, and media technology studies. Students will likely encounter work from the likes of Thomas More, Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Bruno Latour, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, N. Katherine Hayles, and Friedrich Kittler.

ENGL 90981 – "Other": Global Anglophone Avant Garde Poetry

This course takes its title from an anthology of poetry published at the millennium which gathered together writers from Britain and Ireland—many with origins elsewhere, from the Caribbean to South Asia – under the flexible rubric of being “other,” and engaged in avant-garde, oppositional poetics. The project has been echoed in poetics theory that throws its nets far wider, such as Jacob Edmond’s impressive book A Common Strangeness (2012), which reads across to Russia and China, too, from his native New Zealand, to “show how the poetics of strangeness—just as much as history, geopolitics, and economics—have shaped conceptions of the “global.” This course will consider such arguments and the accomplishments of such theoretical projects as it reads the work of Anglophone avant-garde communities and individual poets ranging from North America and the “Black Atlantic” to Europe and South Asia. Further stops may be planned depending on the interests of seminar members, and a final segment may include current work issuing from Ukraine. Requirements will be tailored to individual students and the degrees that they are pursuing.

ENGL 90346 – The Ballad

The ballad is one of the major poetic traditions of world literature. Precisely what a ballad is, however, remains a remarkably vexed question. For the literary schola"ballad" is often used to mean a narrative poem, but this definition does not do justice to a vastly more complex history, which traverses oral traditions, folklore, urban popular song, and cheap print. This course will explore various elements of the ballad both in print and performance, in an attempt to forge new connections between poetry and song. We will learn about the fascinating history of the popular ballad, and how it gave shape to English literature as a discipline. We will engage with ballad archives, which provide a fascinating glimpse into popular urban street song and the mentalities of ordinary people. We will think about the global circulation and distribution of ballads and their relationship to place. And we will consider the advantages and limitations both of print archives and performance studies for conceptualizing the song traditions of the past. Our focus will primarily be on English, Scottish, and Irish Ballads, though this is not a subject that lends itself well to national and political boundaries, so we will follow the songs throughout the Anglophone world and beyond. The course will require a series of readings and listenings, and will include discussion of a diverse array of materials from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, through Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Marinere, and nineteenth-century slip songs, to the Podcasts Dolly Parton's America, and Fire Draw Near.

ENGL 90259 – Devotional Lyric

In the wake of the Reformation-era's massive upheavals, devotional poetry in the English language flourished. This body of literature offers its readers the opportunity to explore questions pertaining broadly to the study of lyric and to the study of the relationships between religion and literature. Early modern devotional poetry oscillates between eros and agape, private and communal modes of expression, shame and pride, doubt and faith, evanescence and transcendence, mutability and permanence, success and failure, and agency and helpless passivity. It experiments with gender, language, form, meter, voice, song, and address; it became a key means for exploring the subjective experience of living the theological ideas and changes of the Reformation period. Given this poetry’s broad-ranging vitality, it is no surprise that contemporary scholarship on devotional poetry engages deeply with theology, history, lyric theory, gender, and sexuality. Authors we'll read will likely include Thomas Wyatt, Anne Locke, Mary Sidney, Philip Sidney, Robert Southwell, Henry Constable, John Donne, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, and John Austin. The course will offer two tracks adjustable to student interests and professional development.

ENGL 90980 – Gender, Sexuality, and the Global South

From fin-de-siècle Decadence to early twentieth-century Modernism, questions of gender and sexuality seemed to pervade in both the aesthetics and politics of art and fiction in Europe and America. From our standpoint a quarter of the way into the twenty-first, now that the geographical landscape of fiction, art, cinema and new media has widened enormously, scholarship has done much to reveal the concurrence of modern aesthetic and political debates in the global south. This course will explore some of the classics of queer, trans, and feminist fiction and scholarship, and read them alongside key texts outside the Western canon. In terms of scholarship, we’ll read Sara Ahmed, Amber Jamilla Musser, Anjali Arondekar, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Petrus Liu, José Esteban Muñoz, Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Annie Erneaux, Martin Manalansan, and others. Primary texts may include JK Huysmans, Against Nature; E.M. Forster, A Passage to India; James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room; Ismat Chughtai, The Crooked Line; Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy; Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile; Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji; Lamya H, Hijab Butch Blues.

ENGL 90007 – Codicology, or the Archaeology of Manuscript Books

This course will train students in the forensic approaches to the medieval manuscript book as a physical artifact. Students will learn to collect and interpret codicological data (e.g., collation, layout, decoration, distribution of scribal labor, book bindings, provenance, etc.). These skills will culminate in the ability to generate analytical manuscript descriptions and to integrate them into a larger research program. Specific treatment will be given to problematic genres of manuscripts such as Bibles, liturgical and music manuscripts, calendars, books of hours, legal texts, and fragments. In addition to the acquisition of codicological skills, students will learn to identify texts and develop a command of the secondary resources and bibliographic reference materials essential to the critical study of manuscripts. Students will work extensively with the medieval manuscripts in the collections of the Hesburgh Library and acquire plenty of hands-on experience. Pre-requisites: Students must be proficient in Latin; a previous course in Latin paleography is not required, but recommended.

ENGL 90325 – Law, Race, and Political Economy 1650-1800

This cross-disciplinary seminar explores the development of key epistemological frameworks and structural formations that remain core features of modernity, Specifically, we will study the ways in which the emergence and flourishing of transnational capitalism reorganizes fundamental political, cultural, and legal conceptions of a.) race, identity, and political community; b.) the colonial-imperial administration of sovereignty at a distance; and c.) public and collective responsibility. After some attention to core theoretical frameworks, we will focus in depth on three episodes (each about four weeks) that illustrate the broader pattern. Our case studies will be: a.) seventeenth century Atlantic settler colonies and political ventures from Massachusetts Bay to Carolina and Barbados; b.) the English East India Company from inception to the early Raj; c.) the transatlantic slave trade from 1619 through the early abolition movement.

ENGL 90250 – Animals in Premodern Literature

In this course, we will read bestiaries, fables, beast epics, and other pieces of literature that focus on animals. We will read works originally composed in English, Arabic, Latin, French, and Spanish (Catalan), although all will be read in English. Included among them are fables attributed to Aesop, the Physiologus, Kalīla wa-Dimna, Marie de France’s fables and lais, Richard of Fournival’s bestiary, Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Parliament of Fowls, the Owl and the Nightingale, Ramon Llull’s Book of Beasts, The Case of the Animals versus Man, and Peter Alfonsus’s Disciplina clericalis. We will also read a good deal of scholarship from the field of animal studies and elsewhere. We will discuss the ways in which animals are represented, their relationship with humans, their relationship to nature, the ethical questions they raise, their classification, the transmission of various stories, and their appeal.

ENGL 90715 – Generative AI in the Wild

Generative AI is a form of computing in which computer systems generate media such as text, images, sound, video, or combinations based on prompts or other information provided to the computer. These systems, including, but are not limited to, ChatGPT, Midjourney & DALLE, have been evolving rapidly and have led to extreme excitement, confusion, and fear. This course provides a survey of how to understand and use a number of these tools including explorations in prompt engineering as well as addressing issues from across the liberal arts including artistic, economic, social/psychological, educational and legal concerns and opportunities.

ENGL 90005 – Latin Paleography

The course is an intensive survey of Latin scripts from antiquity through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Students will be able to accurately read and transcribe Latin scripts, expand systems of abbreviation, identify, date, and localize (when possible) different hands, and defend their interpretations. There will be a strong emphasis on the different varieties of Gothic script (textualis, cursiva, hybrida, etc.). Once the class reaches the twelfth century, students will work extensively with Notre Dame's medieval collection of 288 manuscripts and fragments. Aspects of practical applications and textual criticism will be addressed at the end of the course. All meetings will be held in the Special Collections Seminar Room.

ENGL 90870 – Afro-Cuban Literature and Culture

From the earliest moments of European contact, race and Afro-Cubans have played central roles in the history and cultural development of Cuba. Slavery, the struggle for Cuban independence, and the ensuing (perhaps still ongoing) struggle for Afro-Cuban political and social equality have driven Cuban history, while Afro-Cuban cultural expression has become deeply woven into the national social fabric. This course will examine Afro-Cuban history and culture from the last decade of the eighteenth century to the contemporary moment. Divided into three periods, colonial (1791-1895), early republic (1895-1959), and revolutionary (1959-now) the course will address the history, political movements and cultural forms of expression (religion, music, literature, film, etc.) that have helped to create an identifiable Afro-Cuban culture. So too, the course will examine the tensions between Afro-Cuban culture and “mainstream” Cuban culture, the ongoing push and pull between the two, and thus the impact of an African presence in the ongoing evolution of cubanidad. Titles for the course will include Biography of a Runaway Slave, A Black Soldier’s Story, Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century, Afro-Cuban Tales, Man-Making Words, Afro-Cuban Myths, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba and Looking Within/Mirar Adentro.

ENGL 90541 – Ulysses, a Book of the Future

Many decades ago, Richard Ellmann wrote that “we are still learning to…understand our interpreter,” James Joyce. Ulysses is in many ways a “book of the future.” Though set in a specific past (1904) and written in times of great European wars (WWI, the Easter Rising, the Irish War of Independence), it functions as a work “from the past postpropheticals” (an expression derived from Finnegans Wake). This course aims to propose a rereading of Joyce’s Ulysses in the light of possible hermeneutic interactions and adaptations to our world, in the context of what I call the “quantum theory of interpretation:” a hermeneutic effort based on interaction and guided by concepts such as relationality, uncertainty (indeterminacy), entanglement and so on. Starting from a recognition of past Joycean exegeses, our chapter-by-chapter (or rather episode-by-episode) reading of the great work will help us reflect on the fact that reading is to some extent always a projection into the unknown. We will consider and encourage new critiques which, in the awareness of the partial imponderability of interpretation, are worthy of investigation just as established and canonical commentaries.