English 250

Other Readings and Media

"Ellmann, R.: James Joyce; Joyce, J.: Finnegans Wake, Ulysses; a Course Reader (criticism and theory)



Recommended Texts: Gifford, D.: 'Ulysses' Annotated; McHugh, R.: Annotations to 'Finnegans Wake'; Tindall, W. Y.: A Reader's Guide to 'Finnegans Wake'; Vico, G.: The New Science of Giambattista Vico (trans. Bergin and Fisch) "

Description

"This course will explore Joyce's later work?focusing in its first nine or ten weeks on Ulysses, and then moving into an initiatory probe of Finnegans Wake. Though particular topics explored in the seminar will be determined by the research interests of its members, we will consider, in tandem with the course's core texts, the current state of Joyce (and author) studies and their relation to issues topically of interest across the profession as a whole. These will likely include: Joyce's manipulable status as representative modernist in debates about modernism/post-modernism and in aggregating accounts of the ethics, politics and ideology of modernism; his role, more generally, as paradigmatic touchstone or spoiler in theorizations of literature; his paradoxical status as a canonized colonial writer, and the growing body of work on Joyce, race, and national culture; Joyce and gender; the history of Joyce's canonization, not simply as it opens to view literature's embranglements with the law, but also as it illumines the nature of authorial reception in different academic, non-academic, and national milieus; Joyce's paradoxical resistance to and sanctioning of deauthorizing strategies; the new forms of literary study arising from the publication of Joyce's Archives and the ensuing development, especially in France, of ""pretextual"" and ""genetic criticism""; and Joyce's assimilation both of and in popular culture. Requirements will include one class presentation on the week's assigned reading; a free-form gloss of a passage from Finnegans Wake; and one long paper, due at the end of the term. "