Ulysses by Hugh Kenner
Published 1980 · 173 pages · 50,000 words · about 29 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Ulysses to read?
Ulysses scores 85 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. 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: 75 out of 100
- Academic Joyce criticism.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Scholarly prose.
- Abstraction: 80 out of 100
- Literary analysis.
- Information density: 85 out of 100
- Dense Joyce analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Direct scholarship.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Explains Joycean symbols.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Academic objectivity.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- Scholarly conclusions.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Academic structure.
How Ulysses is regarded
Ulysses holds a literary regard score of 48 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.