Approaches to Teaching World Literature Joseph Gibaldi, Series Editor

PREFACE TO THE VOLUME Ulysses is generally recognized as the most influential of all modernist literary texts. It has dramatically altered how fiction is read and written, yet seventy years after the book's publication, Joycean parody, pastiche, fragmentation, and self-referentiality can still tease readers out of more familiar, seemingly "natural," ways of perceiving both the word and the world and into more complex modes of apprehension in which uncertainty, multiplicity, and overdetermination reign. Joyce's work has also had a major effect on literary criticism and theory. Not only have his books, and particularly Ulysses, spawned intense interpretive debate, but they have also had a significant influence on the development of narrative and linguistic theories as various critics attempt to account for 3 the experience of reading the Joycean text. Jacques Derrida remarks, "Deconstruction could not have been possible ~ithout Joyce" (qtd. in Jones 77). Indeed, as Joyce predicted, Ulysses looks as if it will "keep the professors . busy for centuries" (qtd. in Ellmann, James Joyce 521)-between 1968 and 1990 alone the Library of Congress cataloged over six hundred books on Joyce, over three hundred of them specifically on Ulysses. But the Ulysses that critics have talked and argued about has changed over the years as the dominant assumptions about reading within different societies-what Tony Bennett usefully calls "reading formations"-have changed ("Texts" 7-11). To some extent changes of this kind occur in the reception of any text from one historical period to another, but they have been more extreme with Ulysses than with any other modernist text. Ulysses therefore poses a unique challenge to teachers, who are faced with a stylistically complex text whose ways of being read and whose literary status have undergone vast revisions. Whereas in the 1920s Ulysses was seen by many as an unreadable, vulgar, even obscene book, over the last fifty years it has come to be regarded as perhaps the classic modernist text. Most recently, it has been lauded by poststructuralists for some of the "unreadable" qualities that initially provoked attack. This change makes us recognize that reading formations are not monolithic: at any given point a particular position may be considered dominant, yet tensions among competing and contradictory positions always exist, and out of such tensions change often occurs. It is a commonplace that Joyce's work was hailed within the circles of avant-garde writers, artists, and publishers in Paris and Zurich, even as it was neglected or scorned in England, where Eliot's or Woolf's work was more easily integrated into the developing modernist canon. Early British responses to Ulysses included the characterization "underbred" (Virginia Woolf, Diary 199) and complaints that "he has remarkably little taste" and that he uses "obscene words" (Rebecca West 431). x PREFACE TO THE VOLUME Ulysses presented a challenge to the emerging orthodoxies of modernism and to changes in the field of English studies, which nevertheless proceeded to assimilate it-another example of the tensions within a reading formation. Key moments in the history of the reception of Ulysses are Eliot's influential "mythological" reading, first published in 1923; the exploration of the naturalistic or literal relation between Ulysses and Dublin, which took hold with Richard Kain's demonstration that Joyce frequently consulted Thom's Dublin Directory when writing Ulysses (Fabulous Voyager [1947]); the gradual move in the 1940s and 1950s by such critics as Kain, Harry Levin, and Stanley Sultan to the study of humanistic themes in the novel; Hugh Kenner' s ironic readings of Ulysses; interpretations that focus on biography and the composition process, made possible with the publication of Joyce's letters (1957; 1968), Stanislaus Joyce's My Brother's Keeper (1958), Richard Ellmann'sJanies Joyce (1959; rev. 1982), and A. Walton Litz's The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake (1961); and the proliferation of studies in the 1970s and 1980s on style and narrative techniques, which, of course, continue even with the advent of poststructuralist criticism. Looking back, we can see that all these approaches use assimilative strategies to make Ulysses readable-to naturalize and tame the work to fit acceptable concepts of literature. In time Ulysses came to be seen as an example of triumphant aesthetic wholeness-despite its apparent fragmentation. This view of the text dominated Joyce criticism, teaching, and scholarship from the 1950s until the 1970s, and many still regard it as the normative way of reading Ulysses. These readings of Ulysses are not "objective" but rather are complexly linked to cultural, literary, and institutional forces, and they both open up and close off ways of apprehending the text. Its very status as a "classic"- its shift from a book for underground reading to a monument of high culture-has fundamentally (and in some instances unfortunately) changed how Ulysses will be read and received by readers today. The text's canonical reputation often intimidates students, who fail to enjoy much of the humor of the book, at least in part because they assume that a "classic" must be "serious." Reading early reviews of Ulysses may shock these students almost as much as Ulysses shocked early reviewers, yet glimpsing Ulysses from the perspective of a somewhat different reading formation may demonstrate to students that classics are not instantaneously produced by an author but are created over time by a variety of historical conditions. Similarly, the teacher of Ulysses today is in a position different from that of a teacher forty years ago. Then considered rebellious, even subversive, reading and teaching Ulysses are now generally seen as complicit with dominant academic culture. Increasingly in the last twenty years or so, critics such as Colin MacCabe, Derek Attridge, and Umberto Eco have reversed both early disparaging dismissals and many favorable modernist readings and have opened the possibility of a postmodernist (or a poststructuralist) Joyce. Precisely those PREFACE TO THE VOLUME XI characteristics that had to be explained away or smoothed over to produce the triumphantly canonized Ulysses of modernism-including unreadability, scatology, parody, intertextuality, and pastiche-are now making the book seem a triumphantly "decentered" postmodernist text. Recent feminist studies also call into question many aspects of the modernist views of Ulysses. Critics like Suzette Henke, Bonnie Kime Scott, and Elaine Unkeless problematize the masculinist and modernist tendency to interpret women characters in Ulysses as symbols or archetypes, especially when male characters are frequently particularized as "individuals." Many feminist critics situate Joyce's representations of female characters within the larger cultural context of the dominant attitudes about women that prevailed when Joyce was writing the novel. These revisionist interpretations point up the historically situated nature of any reading. What were once thought to be universal significances are now seen as the product of particular reading practices that, far from being transcendent, are rooted in historically definable conditions and assumptions. Current theory argues, therefore, that canonization is not a process that discovers the intrinsic greatness of a book but rather one that attributes to it particular qualities-whether mythical allusions, symbolic structure, unity, polyvalence, self-referentiality-believed to constitute greatness. Such qualities can shift dramatically from one reading formation to another, but multiple and conflictual ones are always vying for dominance within any formation. The meaning, the status, indeed the very "literariness" of a literary text are thus not fixed but repeatedly negotiated within a reading formation whose concerns are both contemporary and in part determined by the history of the text's past reception. The colleges and universities where Ulysses is read, taught, and written about provide the primary arena for these activities of negotiation, assimilation, and contestation. Such recognitions compel us as teachers to realize (and inform our students) that the questions we help them ask of Ulysses are historically and culturally situated. That these questions were not always asked of the text does not make them arbitrary or subjective: rather, particular questions are important at a given time for particular social and historical reasons. A book on the teaching of Ulysses, then, must suggest different ways of teaching the text as well as help teachers raise questions about the history and implications of those approaches. This volume will, we hope, encourage the teacher to ask not only such questions as What does the text mean? or What is the dominant symbol of this chapter? but Why does the text mean this to some readers today? or Why am I less (or more) interested in symbols than in discourse conventions or the status of women in the novel? and, further, What are the implications of my encouraging students to ask one set of questions over another? To elicit comments from a wide variety of teachers on their practices of teaching Ulysses, the MLA sent questionnaires to randomly selected mem- xii PREFACE TO THE VOLUME hers of its Division on Twentieth-Century English Literature, and the volume editors sent questionnaires to randomly selected members of the James Joyce Society; questionnaires were also circulated at the 1989 James Joyce Conference in Philadelphia. We are indebted to those teachers who responded: their comments helped us to formulate part 1 of this volume, "Materials." Respondents also proposed most of the essay topics that appear in part 2, "Approaches." We have tried to represent a range of approaches, some traditional, many innovative, that indicate the tensions and contradictions in Joyce studies today. In addition, the essays interact on the level of practical pedagogy. From the wealth of suggestions for teaching Ulysses, a teacher may pick the one or two that seem the most promising and follow them through. Indeed, a teacher may want to use different approaches as opportunities to teach Ulysses recur over the years. KMcC and ERS