ENG 340 Studies in Individual Authors
(Post) Colonial Joyce
James Joyce was born and raised in colonized Ireland. In English 340, we will read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, and some of Joyce’s political writing. Our discussion of these texts will focus mainly on the writer’s commentary on imperialism, racial bias, anti-Semitism, and other forms of oppression present in late-colonial Ireland. We will try to determine why Joyce famously declared: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.” In some texts, Joyce anticipates the postcolonial challenges the Irish people may face after their liberation from the British Empire. All of the books included in this course are deeply embedded in and inspired by Dublin—a city with which Joyce had a love-hate relationship, and which provided him with a wealth of characters and stories for his fiction. Ulysses is a challenging book, but its plot and structure become much clearer when one immerses oneself in the life of the city and mimics the path of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus.
Prerequisites: Junior or Senior standing, and one English Literature course, taken at Wabash.
Credits: 1
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