BASC80126 - Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Course Description

“I think he died for me.” (Gretta Conroy, “The Dead” from Dubliners)

In our online introduction to James Joyce’s wonders, we will open diving into Dubliners’ detailed, radiant, edge-cut short stories. Joyce’s capturing of Irish – and human – psychology, limit, longing and thwarting, of nationalist, religious and family webs, of nuances of language – is haunting, and was so provocative that he had to fight for nine years to get the 1914 collection published. We will then slowly savor and examine A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s limning of toddler Stephen Dedalus (somewhat his literary doppelganger) to young man launching himself from Ireland into the Continent and Art – and, later, into the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses. We will have travelled with and grown into Stephen and his Ireland’s nexus to share Portrait’s ending cry: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”