James Joyce

Catalog description

This course offers concentrated study of James Joyce. Readings and discussion may focus on the composition and reception of a single work, such as Joyce’s landmark novel, *Ulysses*. Students will closely read the novel, attending to its formal challenges, the thorniness of its narrative details, and the background and context for its story of a single day in Dublin. Alternatively, the course seminar may cover a range of fictions from Joyce’s career, including *Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man* and *Finnegan’s Wake* to consider the conditions of aesthetic practice and literary, economic, social, and historical forces that shaped those works. Students will acquire a new vantage point on the problems and issues subtending Joyce’s age and works: Irish struggles for political and cultural self-determination; exilic reinvention and cosmopolitan self-fashioning; class disparity and social attitudes; educational opportunity and access; the political and cultural influence of new forms of media; changing conceptions of gender roles and sexual politics; and debates about the place of art in modern society.