Courses / Module

"The critic Fredric Jameson has asserted that Ulysses ends twice. He argues that the penultimate chapter, “Ithaca”, represents the culmination (or perhaps the exhaustion) of mainly “masculine” discourses (concerning religion, politics, science, the public world) while the final chapter, “Penelope”, has been interpreted as introducing a new kind of “feminine” style (affirming individual desire and consumption or even consumerism). Jameson himself prefers the account of reification, of the commodity and of the destruction of “nature” in modernity in Chapter 17 to what he calls the “vitalist ideology” of Molly Bloom’s celebration of the sexual body and of the beautiful landscapes of North County Dublin or Gibraltar in Chapter 18. Certainly both strands in Joyce have had a huge influence on later Irish modernist writing and on contemporary writing that arguably renews or extends Irish modernist experiment. Later writers to be considered on this module include Beckett, Flann O’Brien and Edna O’Brien and we will conclude with two key novels representative of the current wave of Irish literary innovation: McCormack’s Solar Bones and McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.
James Joyce, Ulysses, with special attention to Chapter 17 (“Ithaca”) and Chapter 18 (“Penelope”).
Samuel Beckett, Endgame, Happy Days, Malone Dies
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
Edna O’Brien, Down by the River
Mike McCormack, Solar Bones
Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
Rita Felski, Gender and Modernity
Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Fredric Jameson [debates between Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht and Lukács]
Jameson, “Ulysses and History”.