This class surveys the fiction of the writer often called the most influential and innovative novelist of the twentieth century. For all of its modernist difficulty, Joyce’s fiction, when read in chronological progression, actually educates its readers in strategies of reading each of his successive new styles. Joyce’s most accessible naturalistic stories from Dubliners, and then progresses to his experiments with stream of consciousness in a Portrait of a Young Man before tackling his mature explorations into changing rhetorical styles in Ulysses. We will also look at the contexts of popular, social, and political culture from early twentieth-century Ireland and Europe in which Joyce’s in his fiction, as well as critical scholarship on the fiction.

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