James Joyce

During our next class meeting on Monday, September 23, I will introduce the work of James Joyce, author of The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake. Joyce was a game-changer who brought new levels of sophistication and complexity to English literature. In this way, he was kind of similar to Pablo Picasso, always moving into new ways of making, never doing the same thing twice. 

The first 15 or 20 minutes of class will consist of old-fashioned lecture-based instruction. The final hour will be spent with each of you in a brief mini-conference (5 mins. approx). These conferences will go in reverse alphabetical order. If your last name starts with an "A", you'll be going at the end. If your last name begins with a "Z", you'll be going first. During this conference you'll be getting back both of your one-page essays (Whitman/Dickinson, Wilde), and you'll also have the opportunity to ask me questions, bring up concerns, make suggestions, etc. 

Closely read both James Joyce short-stories, "Grace" and "The Dead" for Wednesday, September 25. These are the final two stories in Joyce's collection, Dubliners. It will take at least a couple of hours to read, maybe longer. There will be a reading comprehension quiz, because it's starting to seem like the assigned reading isn't actually being read by a majority of students. 

There's a good film, titled The Dead, that was John Huston's last movie as a director. However, the movie and the story are different things: one doesn't substitute for the other.