N.B.: THIS CODE WAS CREATED SPECIFICALLY FOR ERASMUS STUDENTS who need a grade for this course.
Please note that to enroll in this course you should have a level of C1 in English.
JAMES JOYCE: A CRITICAL SURVEY--RECOURSING THROUGH ULYSSES (Autumn 2026)
Autumn 2026, Wed 12:30-14:00, Room 34
David Vichnar, PhD (david.vichnar@ff.cuni.cz)
Optional M.A. Course, Special Programme in Irish Cultural Studies & Critical & Cultural Theory
This seminar offers an intensive critical reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses in dialogue with the earlier Dublin of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Rather than treating these works as successive stages in Joyce’s development, the course approaches Ulysses as a continuous return to, revision of, and expansion upon the characters, situations, themes, and formal problems of the earlier fiction: Stephen’s troubled return is read against the apparently triumphant conclusion of Portrait, while Bloom’s wanderings reopen the frustrated lives, desires, social rituals, and political tensions of Dubliners. Proceeding from “Telemachus” to “Circe”, we will examine how Joyce progressively transforms the techniques of his earlier writing—interiority, free indirect discourse, symbolic patterning, urban observation—through rhetoric, montage, music, parody, stylistic imitation, and dramatic hallucination. Our concern will be less with identifying isolated allusions than with asking what happens when Joyce rewrites Joyce: what becomes of the bounded world of a Dubliners story when its characters enter the larger social network of Ulysses; what remains of the aspiring artist of Portrait when we encounter Stephen again; and how techniques devised to represent individual consciousness expand into methods for representing an entire city and culture. The semester culminates in “Circe”, where the unresolved materials of the earlier fiction return in grotesquely theatrical form, while the final three episodes of Ulysses are reserved for the opening weeks of the spring semester before our transition to Finnegans Wake.
Please note that to enroll in this course you should have a level of C1 in English.
JAMES JOYCE: A CRITICAL SURVEY--RECOURSING THROUGH ULYSSES (Autumn 2026)
Autumn 2026, Wed 12:30-14:00, Room 34
David Vichnar, PhD (david.vichnar@ff.cuni.cz)
Optional M.A. Course, Special Programme in Irish Cultural Studies & Critical & Cultural Theory
This seminar offers an intensive critical reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses in dialogue with the earlier Dublin of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Rather than treating these works as successive stages in Joyce’s development, the course approaches Ulysses as a continuous return to, revision of, and expansion upon the characters, situations, themes, and formal problems of the earlier fiction: Stephen’s troubled return is read against the apparently triumphant conclusion of Portrait, while Bloom’s wanderings reopen the frustrated lives, desires, social rituals, and political tensions of Dubliners. Proceeding from “Telemachus” to “Circe”, we will examine how Joyce progressively transforms the techniques of his earlier writing—interiority, free indirect discourse, symbolic patterning, urban observation—through rhetoric, montage, music, parody, stylistic imitation, and dramatic hallucination. Our concern will be less with identifying isolated allusions than with asking what happens when Joyce rewrites Joyce: what becomes of the bounded world of a Dubliners story when its characters enter the larger social network of Ulysses; what remains of the aspiring artist of Portrait when we encounter Stephen again; and how techniques devised to represent individual consciousness expand into methods for representing an entire city and culture. The semester culminates in “Circe”, where the unresolved materials of the earlier fiction return in grotesquely theatrical form, while the final three episodes of Ulysses are reserved for the opening weeks of the spring semester before our transition to Finnegans Wake.
- Teacher: David Vichnar