Joyce's Ulysses by Don Gifford
Published 1974 · 140,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Joyce's Ulysses to read?
Joyce's Ulysses scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 70 out of 100
- Requires knowledge of multiple languages, classical literature, and Catholic theology to follow the annotations.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Primarily identifies allusions; interpretive abstraction is left to the reader.
- Information density: 85 out of 100
- Maximum information density: every line of Ulysses has multiple glosses.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Reference format rather than argument; indirection comes from the encyclopaedic organisation.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Reveals the symbolic weight of Joyce's allusions without imposing symbolic readings.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Scholarly neutrality; the irony of Joyce's text is exposed by the glosses rather than commented upon.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Annotates without interpreting; larger interpretive questions are deliberately left open.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Follows the eighteen episodes of Ulysses with a parallel structure; dense cross-referencing.
How Joyce's Ulysses is regarded
Joyce's Ulysses holds a literary regard score of 87 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.