In 1927 Joseph Campbell traveled to Paris to study. Almost immediately he encountered James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses. Reaching chapter 3 of Joyce's great work, "Proteus," he was puzzled by its opening lines: "Ineluctable modality of the visible;; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read...." To clear up his confusion, he approached Sylvia Beach, the original publisher of Ulysses, at her legendary bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, at 12 rue de l'Odéon. "I went around there in high academic indignation," Campbell wrote. "And she gave me the clues to how to read it. And there you have it, how it changed my career." Campbell moved through the labyrinth of Joyce's creation for sixty years—writing, lecturing, reading Joyce's works to students and audiences worldwide, using depth psychology, comparative religion, anthropology, and art history as tools of analysis. His lectures and reading introduced two generations to the works of James Joyce. And what Campbell discovered through Joyce became the foundation for his work in comparative mythology and religion. Mythic Worlds, Modern Words provides a wide representation of Campbell's works on Joyce, including published writing, lectures, and exchanges with his audiences, from his obituary notice on Joyce in 1941 all the way to lectures delivered a few years before Campbell's death in 1987. Joyce scholar Edmund L. Epstein has arranged this material as running commentary on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Mythic Worlds, Modern Words is an introduction to Joyce's major works, a portrait of Joseph Campbell as a scholar of Joyce, and a major contribution to Joyce criticism—the fruit of a lifetime's meditation on the great Irish writer's fiction.
