University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: February 6, 2003

By SUZANNE CHAMBERLAIN
Reporter Contributor

The Poetry/Rare Books Collection has received the first grant to be awarded to the university from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has given $170,000 to support development of an online scholarly edition of James Joyce's novel "Ulysses."

Jennifer A. McDonough, vice president for university advancement, heralded the grant as a "generous outreach and gesture of support for the University at Buffalo."

"The Mellon Foundation sets the standard for giving to higher-education projects of esteem and significance in the United States," McDonough said. "UB is honored to accept this award and use it on a project of such importance to the entire literary world."

Robert J. Bertholf, curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection, will serve as project director, leading an international group of editors, researchers and technicians in transforming approximately 11,000 pages of manuscripts for James Joyce's novel "Ulysses" and some 5,000 pages of commentary on the manuscripts and the novel into a Web-based, hypertext archive. When competed, the project will be called "Digital Ulysses."

Bertholf said the sheer amount of material makes the task an enormous undertaking. To accommodate its broad scope, the UB project will employ XML technology, which Bertholf called "a radical departure" from past applications of technology in Joycean studies. As used in the "Digital Ulysses" archive, the technology "will revolutionize how information is made available" to future scholars of Joyce's work, he said.

The final "Digital Ulysses" will consist of two sections. The first will present all extant manuscripts of "Ulysses" in a genetic structure, which demonstrates the growth of the novel from the earliest notes to the first edition. The second section will present the 1922 text from two points of view: "reading the novel out of the geography of Dublin, and reading the geography of Dublin out of the novel," Bertholf said.

"The book is a walking tour of Dublin," he said. "So, it is possible to discuss the text of the novel through geographical locations. You can talk about the city as the hero. And you can do the opposite, where you go through the text to discover the geography of the city."

Within each view, annotations will appear on four reader levels: beginning, intermediate, advanced and textual scholar. The intention is to break up the complexity of the novel and make the meaning accessible by matching the levels of understanding of the readers. Furthermore, Bertholf and his group intend to "reveal its intricate structures for further study," he said.

The project reaches out to the international James Joyce community and focuses the expertise of hundreds of scholars on the explication and annotation of Joyce's novel. Michael Groden, professor of English at the University of Western Ontario and an authority on the work of Joyce, will be the project's co-director, in charge of annotations. The manuscript editors for the project are Sam Slote and Luca Crispi, UB James Joyce scholars-in-residence with the Poetry/Rare Books Collection.

Bertholf said the Mellon Foundation grant begins what promises to be a fast-paced period of preparation for the "Digital Ulysses" project, which will be nearly complete by the 100th anniversary of events depicted in "Ulysses." The "Bloomsday 100" celebration, the largest literary/cultural event in Ireland in the past 50 years, will take place on June 16, 2004.

Begun as the "Poetry Project" in 1937, the research collection now consists of about 125,000 first editions and secondary sources, 4,500 runs of little magazines (1,400 current), and 3 million manuscript pages. In addition to Joyce, the library owns large manuscript collections of Robert Graves, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Wyndham Lewis, Helen Adam, Robert Duncan, Robert Kelly and others. Since 1940, The Poetry Collection has been recognized as the first special library in the United States to collect contemporary literary manuscripts.

This grant is counted as part of "The Campaign for UB: Generation to Generation," now entering its final phase. The drive currently has raised more than $208 million of its $250 million goal.