James Joyce is, of course, a canonical writer, Hope Mirrlees you will probably never have heard about. Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is one of the modernist narrative texts, Mirrlees’ “Paris. A Poem” (1919) is just returning to the critical agenda of modernist literary scholars. In this seminar, we will read two very different modernist texts – in terms of genre, length, and canonical status. Nevertheless, the two literary texts can be linked in a number of ways: they are both about life in European cities – Paris and Dublin – in the early decades of the 20th century; they both connect contemporaneous cultures and literary traditions; they both experiment with literary techniques and are interested in new ways of presenting reality and the workings of human consciousness on the page.
We will read the poetic text “Paris” and the narrative text Ulysses with a very close look at the literary – poetic and narrative – techniques that they employ, as well as at the two texts’ presentation of human consciousness and urban life in the early 20th-century.
Please get your own copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses (and start reading it before the semester starts!). The Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics edition are good options.
There is a modern edition of Hope Mirrlees’ “Paris” in her Collected Poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2011.
I will provide a copy of the poem as well as additional critical texts at the beginning of the semester on moodle. |
