Not Quite What They Signed Up For

Ten at night, a maternity hospital on Holles Street, and James Joyce's Leopold Bloom walks into the same room as Stephen Dedalus. The fourteenth episode of Ulysses, Oxen of the Sun, then starts speaking Latin. Scholars adore this chapter, a parade of English prose styles since the Romans, and Philip Kitcher is frank about what it costs: most readers who get this far came for Bloom and Stephen, and he is on their side. He decodes its three opening shouts, works its first impossible sentence down into plain English, and finds Bloom at the students' table, written up by Malory as a knight, though not the usual kind.