Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are both canonical modernist writers. They were born in the same year, 1882, and they both died in 1941. They knew one another and they knew one another’s work. As modernist writers, they experiment with literary techniques and challenge narrative “realist” conventions: they change the way stories were told by focussing on their characters’ consciousness and on the manifold ways reality could be perceived and presented. Yet, their texts differ widely.
In this class, we will read short and epic modernist narratives: We will start with examples from Joyce’s Dubliners and Woolf’s short stories, before we will delve into Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and (parts of) Joyce’s Ulysses (yes, we will). We will read these texts with a very close look at their literary techniques and narrative structures, as well as their presentation of human consciousness and their characterisation of early 20th-century societies.
Please get your own copy Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses and start reading them now (!). Short stories by Woolf and Joyce (from Dubliners) will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Get a critical edition of these narrative texts, as for example:
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (e.g. Penguin Modern Classics or Oxford World’s Classics edition).
James Joyce, Ulysses (e.g. the Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics edition). |
