Introducing James Joyce

Schedule

The seminar will meet five times a week, Monday through Friday, for two hours a day, with a ten-minute coffee break in mid-session. Each meeting should end about lunchtime, after which there will be office hours for individual conferences.

Of the six weeks, the first week will be on Dubliners, the second on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the next three on Ulysses. Depending on the rate of progress through Ulysses, all or part of week six will be on excerpts from Finnegans Wake. Dubliners and Portrait will be in the Viking editions, which come with useful notes and selections of criticism. Other required texts will be Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford, Allusions to Finnegans Wake by Roland McHugh, The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires, and James Joyce's Dublin, by Ian Gunn and Clive Hart.

During the first hour of each seminar, the director will lead a close-reading discussion of the material assigned for the day. For the first week, this discussion will continue after the break. Beginning with Tuesday of week two, each second hour of every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday will begin with a ten-to-fifteen minute presentation given by a participant who will then assume direction of a discussion taking off from the subject of his or her talk, with the director serving as monitor and last-resort answer-man. Each presentation will be based on a written commentary, prepared after consultation with the director, on a work or group of works of secondary materials all related to one particular line of inquiry. In order to maximize the time available for them to make their choices, participants will, on the first meeting day, be given a list of possible topics. The written commentaries will be due on the Friday of each week except for the last and should be between one to two double-spaced pages in length. Participants will be able to choose any one of the commentaries they have written for me so far as the starting point of their in-seminar presentations.

Proposed syllabus