Who’s Afraid of James Joyce?

Joyce once boasted, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one's immortality.” With parallels to Hamlet, the Bible, and Homer’s Odyssey in his own Ulysses, Joyce attempts to rival the epic ambitions of the greatest writers in the Western tradition. No wonder that he is considered an icon of difficulty, arguably the greatest writer of the 20th century, an Irish writer of lasting international influence. In this course, we will confront Joyce’s reputation and social context, as well as his rich complexity—from the deceptively simple sentences of his short stories in Dubliners, to the evolving narrative of Stephen Hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to his experiment in dramatic form in Exiles, to the odyssey of character and language in Ulysses, to the linguistic invention of a short section of Finnegans Wake: “I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition. I’m at the end of English.” In this course, we will tackle Joyce’s comic, epic, modernist, postmodernist, and semi- and postcolonial fictional experiments.