Program Description:
Twenty-two students and the instructor worked on Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Ulvsses, Finnegans Wake, and associated scholarly materials. Through seminars, small-group
discussions, workshop sessions on Indo-European linguistics, presentations of Modernism in music and visual art,
and the witnessing of films, we attempted to appreciate Joyce's works in themselves and to understand them in the
context of earlier-twentieth-century art and thought. Writing assignments included the provision of interpretive
notes on specific passages, the tracing of thematic patterns in Ulysses, and web-diagrams exploring the
complexities of passages in Finnegans Wake. In addition to the discussions, presentations, and writings,
each full-time student was responsible, individually or as a member of a team, for a presentation in the last week of
classes of original work related to the study of Joyce. These presentations ranged from lectures summarizing
research papers, through dramatic readings and musical compositions and photography, to a video production based
on Ulysses.
Evaluation:
Jesse's candid and eloquent self-evaluation demonstrates how dedicated, involved, and perceptive he was in his
studies - how he committed himself to the texts Joyce has left us, to pursuing research well beyond normal
expectations, and to thinking/feeling his way into making the works come alive. From the outset, he understood
the logic of the assignments and the purpose of all the components of the program. His teammates in his small
discussion-group wrote about how energetically he maintained his focus, how much he contributed from his
understanding of the Irish context, and how his bringing in of further research helped them. In turn, I found his own
comments on his teammates to be mature, supportive, clear-sighted, and trustworthy. In both the small-group
discussions and the seminars of the whole program, he showed great tact in dealing with his less mature, and in
some cases less committed, classmates. Intent upon shaping everything which comes his way into a unified,
developing world-view, he made especially good use of our studies in comparative linguistics and brought every bit of
this new knowledge - phonetic relationships, mutations, and Graeco-Latinate components of English words -- to bear
in the web-diagrams he devised to explicate richly difficult passages in Finnegans Wake. But all of his writing was
an energetic joy to read, vigorous and thought-provoking. His tracing of the references to the "Invincibles of Phoenix
Park" through Ulysses drew from me the comment: "This is an excellent job, directly responsive to the assignment
and elucidating yet more of the meaningful complexity of the work." (The "creative writing" which he shared with
me had its own kind of power.)
As he has said, he collaborated with three teammates in designing, writing most of the adaptations, and acting in a
final project which entailed dramatization of sections of Joyce's work, mainly from A Portrait... -- carefully chosen,
well prepared, well performed before an appreciative audience, and well discussed in an accompanying essay. And for
the evaluation process, he submitted a reflective journal which indicated his penchant for advanced
thinking-into-writing, his pressure to integrate his learning, and his being well on the way toward achieving a
well-furnished mind. All in all, his performance in this program amounted to a fine job of work and left me regarding
him not so much as a somewhat older student but as a somewhat younger colleague.
Suggested Course Equivalencies (in quarter hours) TOTAL: 16
* (indicates upper division credit)
*8 - Readings in the works of James Joyce
*3 - Principles of Literary Interpretation (including Advanced Expository Writing about Literature)
*3 - Introduction to Comparative Linguistics
*2 - Project: Dramatization of passages from Joyce's works