Monica Youn: Nora/Laura (January 2014)

This lecture begins by describing a necklace James Joyce commissioned for his wife, Nora Barnacle, in 1909. Youn presents a theory of how the necklace relates to Joyce’s ideas about the Petrarchan sonnet, explores the form’s “hangover effect,” and presents a range of classical and contemporary examples, including works by Milton, Yeats, Rita Dove, and Bernadette Mayer.