JJRC - Academic Programmes

BA

The following modules allow you the opportunity to study Joyce in depth as part of your BA programme:

• ENG 20440: Reading the Story of Ireland: Narrative and Storytelling in Irish Literature
• ENG 30490 Reading Joyce
• ENG 30520 Reading Ulysses

ENG 20440: Reading the Story of Ireland: Narrative and Storytelling in Irish Literature
This course will focus on the operations of narrative in modern Irish literature and drama from the nineteenth century to the present. Of particular importance will be the role of writers in the construction of powerful narratives of national identity at key moments in Irish history, and the subsequent interrogation of them by later generations of Irish writers. The preoccupation with the act of storytelling itself within Irish writing will also be explored. Students will be encouraged to engage in detail with the primary texts and to explore a range of theoretical issues in relation to narrative, postcoloniality, feminism and cultural materialism.

ENG 30490 Reading Joyce
This seminar is both an introduction and a comprehensive survey of Joyce’s oeuvre. We will explore the proposition that all of Joyce’s books together constitute one integral and coherent work. With close readings of the text, the seminar will focus on consistent themes and issues in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses andFinnegans Wake such as: the relationship between an ostensibly realistic surface narrative and its symbolic form as well as the foundational role of language in history, politics, society, and art.

Required Course texts:
Dubliners, edited by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: OUP, 2000).
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, edited by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: OUP, 2000).
Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler (London: The Bodley Head, 1993, reprinted 2008).
Finnegans Wake, Book I, chapter 7, ‘Shem the Penman’.

ENG 30520 Reading Ulysses
The focus of the seminar is a close reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. It will explore the multifaceted nature of the content and styles of some of the individual episodes as well as the way in which the novel as a whole can be considered an exemplary encyclopaedic modernist work. The seminar will also examine how Ulysses was conceived and written and how such an understanding alters our various readings of the published text. Students will be encouraged to explore their own interests for the final essay assignment and be directed towards appropriate secondary criticism.

Required Course texts:
Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler (London: The Bodley Head, 1993, reprinted 2008).

MA

Students taking the MA in Modernity, Literature and Culture and the MA in Anglo-Irish Literature are encouraged to pursue research on Joyce and to write dissertations on aspects of his work.
A module on Joyce is offered in both these MA programmes:

ENG 40430 Joyce, Ulysses / ENG41160 Approaches to Joyce (Semester 2, Professor Anne Fogarty and Dr Luca Crispi), Monday 11.00-1.00, J208 (MA in Anglo-Irish Literature and MA in Modernity, Literature and Culture)

Course Description: This course will widen your understanding of James Joyce as one of the quintessential writers of Irish modernism and a key figure of international modernity. You will learn why Joyce is such a revolutionary author and why his work still spawns controversy. The conflicting biographical views of Joyce will be examined as will the shifting frameworks adduced in which to interpret his writings including those of postcolonial author, Irish revivalist manqué, and disaffected modernist exile. Above all, this course will centre on the challenge of reading and interpreting Ulysses with several sessions devoted to close interpretation of its key episodes. The degree to which episodes might usefully be paired will be considered as will the differences between the early and late styles. Exiles, Joyce's only surviving play, will be examined not as a transitional text but as an important early instance of his adoption of modernist techniques. Current debates about the kind of reader Joyce’s Ulysses presupposes, whether untutored or scholarly,veteran or virgin, will particularly be reviewed. In preparation for this course, it is recommended that you read Ulysses and the other primary texts, the critical works by Richard Ellmann and Hugh Kenner, Declan Kiberd, and Margot Norris, and the biographies of Richard Ellmann and Gordon Bowker.

Primary Texts: Joyce, James. Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing (Oxford)
Poems and Exiles (Penguin).
Ulysses Gabler Edition(Penguin).

Secondary Reading: Bowker, Gordon. James Joyce: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2011.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. Ed. 1959; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966.
The Consciousness of Joyce. London: Faber, 1977.
Ulysses on the Liffey. London: Faber, 1972.
Kenner, Hugh. Dublin's Joyce. London: Chatto and Windus, 1955.
Joyce's Voices. London: Faber, 1978.
Ulysses. Rev. Ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses and Us. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.
Norris, Margot. Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

PhD

Applications are invited from suitably qualified students who are interested in undertaking research on Joyce.
Textual projects and studies of the material and political dimensions of Joyce's work are especially welcome as are comparativist approaches to Joyce and genetic or archival investigations. 
For further information about the PhD application process see: https://www.ucd.ie/englishdramafilm/study/postgraduate/phdsandmlitts/