One of my favorite parts of Cornell is its library system. It’s a real change from when I studied abroad last fall at the National University of Ireland in Galway. While I loved my time there, I had trouble finding a place to study. With more than 15,000 students, the campus was home to only one small library! I was shocked to discover this, especially coming from Cornell where there are more than twenty.
Last week I attended my first English seminar, “Reading the Novel,” where will we study James Joyce’s Ulysses. My professor introduced us to Joyce’s work by taking an underground field trip to the James Joyce Collection, in Kroch Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.
It’s one of the largest Joyce collections in the world. In addition to drafts, typescripts, and first editions of Ulysses, the collection also contains Joyce’s personal letters, including one (left) to Henrik Ibsen, dated March 1901.
While looking at one of the original manuscripts of Ulysses, I noticed how Joyce’s handwriting curiously slants to the upper right corner of each page. I imagined that Joyce wrote these pages as he was sitting at a park or a pub in Dublin—maybe even a place I had visited on one of my many trips to the capital city last fall.
To see the origins and progression of Ulysses, from notes, to a typescript with handwritten revisions, to a first edition, to a second edition, gave me a better understanding of the immense amount of time and painstaking detail that Joyce committed to his work.
The next time I get discouraged while writing a paper, I’ll think about that trip to Kroch to remind myself that first attempts are never perfect.
— Jamie Leonard ’09