James Joyce may well be the most important, the most radical, and the most exciting writer in English in the last hundred years. In this seminar we will read and discuss portions of his writing from every stage of his career: some of the short stories from Dubliners, all of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and portions of Ulysses and a couple of extracts from the amazing and intensely strange book, Finnegans Wake, on which Joyce spent seventeen years. Joyce never wrote the same book twice: for each project, he developed a new style, took on a new subject matter, and, even, expressed in each a whole new attitude to life and the world. In this seminar we will trace his intellectual and artistic journey. Joyce was born in Ireland and settled in Trieste, then Paris: we will consider the contexts which influenced his writing. Key topics: modernism, post-colonialism, gender and sexuality, flanerie, consumer culture, the city, alienation, ‘silence exile and cunning’ and ‘the revolution of the word.’

Required Texts:

1. Dubliners, James Joyce  (Penguin Paperback)  ISBN:  014 01.8647 6
2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Paperback) o 14 01.8683 2
3. Ulysses, James Joyce  (Vintage, Paperback) 0 394 74312 1 (pbk)