The MVP is proud to announce the winner of our “Year of Ulysses International Art Competition.” Travis Williams, whose “Ulysses — The Human Bodyssey” “seeks to stand as a visual microcosm of Joyce’s masterpiece and to visually represent, as Joyce brilliantly achieved in Ulysses, the unions of world and word, science and art, the body and language, and ultimately, the flesh and the spirit.”  Travis receives a $500 cash prize.

Among other things my book is the epic of the human body.”
– James Joyce

Ulysses by James Joyce is a paragon of modernist literature. Taking place over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, Joyce allegorically retells Homer’s The Odyssey for the modern age. In a chart published in Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses: a Study, each of the eighteen episodes of Ulysses are shown to correspond to an episode or character of The Odyssey and, with the exception of three episodes, to a specific organ of the human body. Using this systematic diagram as my guide, I have reconstructed Joyce’s Ulysses in the form of a life-size drawing of the human body, illustrating each organ using only words from the corresponding episodes of the novel.

For more information about Williams’s project, visit http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/jwprc/2010/posters/33/