Dubliners

James Joyce's Dubliners -- a collection of short stories originally completed around 1905, but not published until nine years later -- is widely regarded as one of the finest works of its kind. As with all of Joyce's works, it seeks after the essence of "dear old dirty Dublin," the city in and near which Joyce had grown up, and the city -- though he left Ireland never to return -- in which he still dwelt in his imagination, and was the essential core of every one of his later works.

Dublin in 1904 was a bustling city, with all kinds of shops and commerce which brought the goods of the world to its doors. And yet, at the same time, it was home to some of the darkest and dingiest slums of its day, corridors of hopelessness from which many never fully emerged. Joyce himself had travelled through at least two of its social classes, thanks to the wavering fortunes of his father; he'd enjoyed both a middle-class home and a semi-private education at Clongowes Wood Academy, and far poorer quarters along with the cold water and thrashings at the O'Connell School operated by the Christian Brothers. The Jesuits were intellectual in bent, and Joyce much preferred them; the loss of his place there and return to dismal life in Dublin were hard on him.

But the change did Joyce a favor; having been dislocated from his class and his comrades, he experienced a crisis of faith with his religion, and was thus better prepared than most to see Ireland in a multi-dimensional way, and to be drawn into the European modernist movement. Unlike other writers of his generation, he never gravitated to the nationalism of the Young Ireland movement and its successors, and had nothing but disdain for the attempt at the revival of Irish Gaelic literature and culture (at one point in "The Dead," the main character pointedly objects to the notion that Irish is "his" language). One can readily imagine Joyce, his eyesight poor and always growing poorer, peering through thick-lensed spectacles at the plight of the people about him, whose lives were strictly circumscribed by poverty, strict Catholic morality, and the consciousness that Ireland was a subjugated nation, claimed by the English and with her harps on its flag.

There is nothing supernatural in these stories -- only the extreme inner consciousness of loss, of the fragility of beauty, of the fleeting nature of life's few pleasures.  In Araby, we follow a desperately shy and isolated young man through his day, and into the night on a trolley in a doomed attempt to find a fitting gift for the girl he loves but can barely speak with. In Clay, we play a little game -- a game about destiny, family, and (yes) death. And in The Dead, we come full circle, looking within and without the walls of polite Dublin society, and witness the emergence of a newly urgent sense of identity that, though certainly Irish, rejects the cultural conventions of "Irishness."

Kwaidan

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was a man between cultures -- quite a few of them, in fact. His father was Irish, but his mother was a Greek noblewoman. The one thing they had in common, apparently, was a fanatical devotion to Roman Catholicism; the one thing their son felt most strongly was an aversion to it. After an acrimonious separation, Lafcadio was packed off to Ireland to live with a series of relatives, each of whom abandoned his care to another; eventually he was sent off to a Catholic boarding school and later to a seminary, both of which only hardened his feelings. Hearn, as soon as he could, left for America, where he supported himself as a journalist, first in Cincinnati, then in New Orleans. From there, he went as a foreign correspondent, initially in the French West Indies and then in Japan. He was 40 years old when he arrived, and would only live to be 54, and yet it was in Japan that he made an international name for himself; he obtained a teaching job, married the daughter of a local samurai, and learned Japanese, which he came to speak fluently. His collections of Japanese stories, among which Kwaidan is the best known, have remained in print ever since; in 1965, three stories from this book were adapted by Masaki Kobayashi in his film Kwaidan. His life was also the basis for a play, "The Dream of a Summer Day," which toured Ireland in 2005.

Western audiences have always enjoyed tales of ghosts and, as Hearn calls them, "strange things." The Japanese settings of Hearn's tales have led some to accuse him of exoticizing Japanese culture, but these same stories have gained and retained popularity in Hearn's adopted homeland. The best of them have elements which appeal across cultures, and among them, the tales in Kwaidan rank among the finest tales of terror this side of Edgar Alan Poe.

Welcome to English 121

Map of the World as a "Tube" Map © Michael Tompsett

Welcome to our Summer Session II course, English 121: Literature and Nation!

The idea that literature, like food or music or dance, should possess or embody a national culture, is quite a recent one in terms of world history. The older dream was of a universal literature, written in Greek or Latin and readable around the world and for all time. This dream, for better or worse, faded with the collapse of the ancient empires, particularly that of Rome. It wasn't until some centuries later, when nations were beginning to emerge from the medieval checkerboard of duchies and domains, that the idea of writing literature in one's own native language, and expressing the natural and national character of its speakers, began to emerge. It was this vernacular writing with which national literatures were born, and with them the sense that each nation ought to have its own pantheon of literary and artistic giants.

Today, while we can use terms like "American Literature," "Irish Literature," or "Japanese Literature," it's not always easy to separate them off.  People emigrate from country to country; most nations contain many languages, ethnicities, and faiths; the most successful literature is translated and read around the world. Still, each country's literary heritage has something of the essence of the nation in it, both as it might be perceived internally, and as it might be seen by others.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a hybrid course, and we will not be meeting on all of the scheduled dates; approxinately half of our course work will be done online, in the manner of a "distance learning" class. More information is on the syllabus, and I'll go over the course structure at our first class meeting.