Splash Biography

James Joyce's intensely original fiction defined and redefined what modern writing is like. Over the course of his life his evolving style from realism to philosophical stream-of-consciousness to polyglot dream-language is accompanied by deep analysis of religion, Ireland, love, and all kinds of bodily fluids. By focusing on Joyce's conception of theater as the theme of this class, we'll isolate a strand of his thought and trace it through his life to get a sense of his changing attitudes toward art and living. This class will be modeled on the creative thinking of a college humanities class, but I'll try to use as much common sense language as possible. Lots of Joyce is confusing to everybody: even if some ideas get you lost we'll still get a good taste of how Joyce writes and what a specialized humanities class in college is like.

Before James Joyce became embraced by American modernists like Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway for his searingly honest autobiography (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), or internationally notorious for inventively crude language (in Ulysses), or dismissed as a crazy writer of gibberish (Finnegans Wake), he was our age. In this class we'll look at, and discuss, a great writer's earliest ideas as a high school and college-aged student.

We will explore the literary phenomenon of New Sincerity in the United States. First, we will consider its historical context as an heir to Post-Modernism. We will examine in-depth the writing styles of Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Franzen with possible supplementary materials by the likes of Foer, Chabon, and Powers. From this analysis we will see if indeed New Sincerity can be declared a Post-Post Modernism of sorts, merely its own genre, or neither, by looking for consistently identifiable stylistic and narrative traits.