Writings of James Joyce
In this course we will study the works of James Joyce in the contexts of Modernist aesthetics, Irish cultural and political history, and twentieth-century discussions of race, class, gender, and religion. We will also explore Joyce’s progress as a technical innovator of the short story and novel forms. We will focus on these issues through stories from Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Ulysses (1922). We may also touch on select passages of Finnegans Wake (1939). Background readings from Irish history, Modernism, fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism, and more will be posted on blackboard. Students will be evaluated through a take-home mid-term and a major term-paper on Ulysses. The class may also opt for graded oral reports.
Neil Davison
Associate Professor of English
Oregon State University
Moreland 240B
2550 SW Jefferson Way
Corvallis,
OR
97331 USA
Tel:
541-737-1633
Email contact form
Credentials
- Ph.D. - University of Maryland 1993
- M.F.A. - Columbia University 1984
- B.A. - University of Maryland 1982
Research
A member of the Department since 1995, Neil Davison teaches courses in British Modernist Literature, works of James Joyce, 19th-and 20th-century Irish literature, Jewish cultural studies, 20th–century poetry, and Holocaust literature and film. In his classroom and scholarship, he focuses on Enlightenment Modernity, constructs of racial, gender, and religious identities, and how modernism informs the aesthetics and politics of nineteenth and twentieth-century texts. His work has also been influenced by Postcolonial theory, Masculinity Studies, and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. He has a special interest in teaching the works of Joyce, Conrad, Shaw, Crane, Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Auden, Hemingway, Robert Lowell, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Larkin, and the Holocaust writings of Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, and André Schwarz-Bart. He has published on Joyce, George Moore, Flann O’Brien, George du Maurier, W.B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Schwarz-Bart, Philip Roth and others in such journals as Journal of Modern Literature, James Joyce Quarterly, Clio, Literature and Psychology, Jewish Social Studies, and Textual Practice. He has also placed poetry in Ironwood, Small Pond, Cimarron Review, Abraxas, West Branch, and other small-press magazines. His monograph, James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and “the Jew” in Modernist Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1996; paper edition 1998), examines Joyce’s career-long interest in European Jewry and 19th-century forms of anti-Semitism. Another monograph, Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern was published by the Routledge Studies in 20th-Century Literature series in 2010. He is presently at work on a critical biography of André and Simone Schwarz-Bart that focuses on race and gender in the collaborative expression of their Jewish and Afro-Caribbean identities.
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