English 271: Joyce
Jefferson Hunter
MWF 11:00-12:10

A list of phrases to describe Joyce: the greatest modern novelist, the Irish Homer, the Irish Dante, the Irish Rabelais, "the man who destroyed the nineteenth century" (T. S. Eliot), a pornographer (U. S. Post Office), a virtuoso stylist, a labyrinthine pedant, "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples" (Virginia Woolf), "a man of small virtue, inclined to alcoholism" (J. Joyce). As we read Joyce's works we'll examine these and other views of the novelist, not so much to find out which are right as to find out which are most helpful. Only one comment on Joyce is really wrong: "people like him because he is incomprehensible" (Gertrude Stein). Everything in this course is based on the belief that Joyce is comprehensible. The task, and I hope the pleasure, is to comprehend him. We'll read the short stories in Dubliners, the early novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the play Exiles, a few poems from Chamber Music, and brief selections from Joyce's last and most experimental work, Finnegans Wake (all these are collected in the Penguin Portable Joyce). There will be collateral readings in Richard Ellmann's distinguished biography of Joyce, and some informal research into the huge, sometimes helpful, sometimes crackpot Internet literature on Joyce. But we'll devote most of our time and effort to Ulysses, Joyce's recreation of Homeric epic in the Dublin of 1904, identifying its major themes and techniques and thoroughly discussing the issues which it raises, such as the usefulness of myth, the place of pop culture in high art, the difficulty of modernist literature, and Joyce's views of women and men.

In class I'll lecture informally, answer questions, ask a few questions myself, and encourage discussion whenever it seems called for. Students in this course generally have a good deal to say.

Course requirements: regular attendance; a series of brief (one- or two-page) written exercises, collectively graded; an 8 to 12 page essay on Ulysses, written in drafts; a final examination, oral or written (your choice).