English 333: Major Figures: Joyce and Woolf

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Thus are introduced two of the most famous characters in 20th-century literature, captured forever in snapshot glimpses going about the business of everyday life. Modernist texts, and these two notoriously difficult writers, can be surprisingly accessible. After all, both Joyce and Woolf revolutionized fiction in part by resisting the habitual decorum of the novels of their time, and by giving to “realism” a new twist: a more direct and daring representation of experience, a new language for expressing and appreciating the mundane.

This course introduces students to in-depth study of two of the greatest, most famous, and most influential writers of the 20th century. Through close study of major works by each author, we will savor their exhilarating experiments with language, and come to understand the social, philosophical, literary, and political purposes of their experimentation. The survey of major works will include Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, which we will read in its entirety over the course of several weeks. Study of Woolf’s works will include the major experimental novels, typically Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Focus will be on understanding as well as delighting in these major works, while supplementary readings and lectures will offer background on the lives of the writers, their historical context, their influence on subsequent writers, and the questions about literary form and literary history raised by their works.

A mix of formal and informal essay assignments, some creative and experimental, will provide the basis for a continuous practice of written analysis, interpretation, and appreciation of the works being studied. In addition, a final exam will assess the grasp of texts, concepts, and background as well as provide an ultimate in-class essay. Departures from the norm will occasionally divert the class: staged readings, for example, of the notoriously upside-down, surreal world of Ulysses’ “Nighttown” section (which alludes to the seduction by Circe in Homer’s Odyssey), and of the dinner party, with its interplay of spoken and interior monologues, in To the Lighthouse.