Immerse Yourself

A madeleine dipped in tea. April is the cruelest month. A stream of consciousness culminating in “yes I will Yes.” These are some of the most familiar icons of modernist literature, all tied to the year 1922. In February of that year, James Joyce published Ulysses. Known for its literary experimentation, Ulysses transmuted the voyage of Odysseus to the perambulations of an adman in Dublin in 1904. If Joyce reimagined the possibilities of the novel, T. S. Eliot shattered and reknit the conventions of poetry in The Waste Land.