James Joyce and Sally Rooney

Catalog description

James Joyce is probably Ireland’s most famous dead author, and Sally Rooney its most famous living one. Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Ulysses (1922) have frequently been rated as the greatest short-story collection and the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and Rooney’s novels have received widespread critical acclaim, large sales, and two television series adaptations. In this course, students will read key pieces of fiction by Joyce and Rooney, in order to investigate the human need to tell stories, make art, and foster social change. Through textual analysis, class discussion, and creative and critical response essays, students will examine how literary texts employ distinctive formal devices, structures, and genres to affect and inform their audiences and how these literary techniques and features have the potential to increase our capacity for imagination and empathy and to expand our ethical awareness of self and other across space and time. In addition, students will explore how changing contexts of history, culture, race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, or ethnicity have influenced literary creation, interpretation, and evaluation.