THEATER : Joyce’s Rhapsody in Pink, Blue

The jaunty poster for next week’s vast California Joyce symposium at UC Irvine has palm trees and ocean ripples and pink and blue colors on it, all of which would seem more suitable for a California surfing contest than a scholarly conference.

More suitable, that is, until you get a look at the words of the background text running from the top of the poster to the bottom. Anyone who has read James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” and even some who haven’t, would recognize the passage instantly:

... O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a flower of the mountain yes.... The words are taken from Molly Bloom’s fabled interior monologue at the end of the novel as she drifts off to sleep thinking about her life and bringing herself to a sexual climax in a stream of consciousness that goes for 45 pages.

Pink and blue indeed. Or as UCI professor Margot Norris--a Joycean scholar who helped organize the six-day conference--says: “Joyce had wonderfully large sympathies.”

In keeping with those sympathies, more than 200 scholars from around the world are expected to attend the conference for the presentation of literary papers and cultural performances open to the public.

Among the highlights:

* A three-hour reading of the entire Molly Bloom soliloquy by the Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan, Monday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. $8 to $15.

* A screening of the 1967 movie “Ulysses,” Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the Student Center Crystal Cove Auditorium, followed at 8 p.m. by a talk with the director Joseph Strick. Free.

* Readings of research papers with such intriguing titles as “What Are You Doing in the Dark? Masturbation in ‘Dubliners,’ ” and “Eating the Hostess, or How to Offend the Holy Ghost.” For registrants; times and places vary.

* A daylong series of panels exploring “Joyce, Modernism and the Social Function of Art,” July 2 beginning at 9:45 a.m. in the Monarch Bay Room of the Student Center, followed by the keynote address of Oxford University’s Terry Eagleton at 4 p.m. in Crystal Cove Auditorium. Free.