Qualifying Condition(s) and ASSESSMENT DEADLINES

  10 days prior to the oral presentation, students are required to submit their detailed working notes.  Each presentation will explicate a “chapter” in ULYSSES or a shorter text.  Students will get feedback before the presentation; their initial notes and their ability to incorporate the feedback into the oral presentation will make up the mark for this component.  The research paper (circa 2000 words, plus references) will need to substantiate an argument pertaining to a research question in any of the texts studied in the module but it MUST NOT deal with the same material as the oral presentation..  The one-hour examination will assess familiarity with the literary texts and the ability to interpret Joyce.

This module is devoted to a thorough study of James Joyce’s oeuvre.  The aim of the module is to arrive at a good understanding of modernism and some prominent issues of the twentieth century, such as dispossession, alienation, gender inequality, anti-semitism, the condition  of , Roman Catholicism and the British Empire in the Dublin of 1904, the city and the “flaneur” etc.  Furthermore, the module develops a close understanding of genre—primarily that of the short story and the novel in the hands of arguably the greatest prose writer in the language; it will also aim to assess Joyce’s poetry and drama within his life work.

The assessment is intended to develop students' skills through continuous work and to ensure that they develop expertise in oral as well as written presentation.  Besides students will be required to do research and incorporate their findings into an argumentative paper.  The final exam will ensure that they have acquired both the theoretical and the literary historical skills presented in the module.

The Module Aims to:

• introduce students to a range of work of James Joyce and “high modernism”

   

• develop a deep understanding of the genre of the novel
• introduce skills in close reading via a focus on specific texts
• enable students to develop self-reflexive skills in their preparation
• gives students practice in doing independent research.

   

By the end of  module students will have:

a basic knowledge of a range of the work of Joyce and the areas in which he shaped prose fiction in English

an understanding of how to incorporate the result of close reading and research into presentations

students will have acquired techniques of reading and interpreting stylistically unconventional literary works

Week 1 

The origins of literary modernism, Irish life at the beginning of the twentieth century and the life of James Joyce

Week 2 

DUBLINERS (“An Encounter;”  “Araby”, “The Boarding House”, “A Little Cloud”).  The question of paralysis and its representation.  The use of language and the interpretive horizon in the text.

Week 3

“A Painful Case”, “A Mother”, “The Dead”.  Practice in close reading. The epiphany

Weeks 4

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN; Joyce’s departure from the nineteenth-century novel; changes in the production of character, narrative and plot.  The text and the mediation of the “inner world”.  The question of “art” and why it matters.

Weeks 5-8

ULYSSES.  Detailed and systematic study of the novel and its dialogue with Homer’s epic; myth in modern writing; Joyce’s take on “epic totality”; close readings initiated in student presentations.  An introduction to narratology; Joyce’s women; Joyce and politics.

Week 9 

FINNEGANS WAKE (a few selections): the overall significance of the novel and its place in the canon; close reading and analysis

Week 10  

EXILES and a selection of poems.  Joyce as dramatist and poet

Week 11

The literary “Joyce Industry”; narrative technique and artistic vision in Joyce and Woolf; the stream of consciousness, interior monologue and the epiphany in literature after Joyce.  Joyce and Post-Modernism; Joyce in translation

Week 12

Revision

Week 13

Exams/ Assessment

Week 14

Exams/ Assessment

Week 15

Reading Week

Assessment Deadlines:

Research Paper: 12pm Wednesday 25^th May 2011

Oral: Through out module.

Exam: Weeks 13-14 of semester 2. Exact date TBC.

Primary Reading

 James Joyce’s Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Exiles, a selection of poems and extracts from the novel Finnegans Wake to be distributed by the instructor

Secondary readings:

Attridge, Derek.  2004. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barta, Peter I.1996.   Bely, Joyce, D"qblin.  Peripatetics in the Modernist European City Novel.  London: University Press of Florida .

Beja, Moris. 1992. James Joyce: A Literary Life. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Brown, Richard. 2008. A Companion to James Joyce.  Oxford : Blackwell Publishers.

Bulson, Eric. 2006.  The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ellmann, Richard. 1983. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gifford, Don. 1989.  “Ulysses” Annotated.  Berkeley: University of California Press

Hart, Clive and David Hayman (Eds) .1977.  James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: Critical Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Norris, Margo.(ed)  1998.  A Companion to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” London : Palgrave

Wollaeger, Mark A. (ed)  2003.  James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press.