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Barry Devine and Ellen Scheible eds., "Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century" (UP of Florida, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Ellen Scheibel
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- [01:31]
Barry Devine
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Dan Moran
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dan Moran. Barry Devine is Associate professor of English at Heidelberg University. And Ellen Scheibel is Professor of English at Bridgewater State University. Together they've edited a collection of essays titled Teaching James Joyce in the 21st century. Published in 2025 by the University Press of Florida. It's a collection of pieces by scholars and teachers about the methods, occasional trials and rewards of teaching the works of James Joyce in a number of different venues. Barry and Ellen, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:07]
Ellen Scheibel
Thank you. Thanks, Dan.
- [02:09]
Barry Devine
Thank you.
- [02:10]
Dan Moran
So, in any order, however you want to pick this up, tell our listeners about your own experiences about teaching the works of James Joyce and why he's a perennial favorite on syllabi everywhere.
- [02:19]
Ellen Scheibel
I mean, such a gift of a question, Dan. Thank you. Yeah, you know, I think anyone who gets to teach Joyce is very lucky. And, you know, Barry can speak obviously to his experiences at his university. I feel like I'm very lucky. I won a little bit of the jackpot when I got hired because I was hired to teach in an Irish literature program. So I was hired to actually teach Irish lit, which is not always common these days. So I won't say how long ago I was hired, because then that's embarrassing. But it was long enough that they were actually hiring people to teach Irish literature. So I actually get to teach Joyce every semester. And I teach mostly Dubliners, and more often than anything else, I teach the dead. And I teach the dead across all sort of levels of my classes. I usually teach the dead in my modern contemporary Irish lit class, where we kind of start with it to think about modernism. It's a lot easier to do that with the dead than it is maybe with Ulysses in a class that spans, you know, the 20th and 21st century. And then I also teach the dead and Dubliners in a senior seminar about the Irish domestic interior. And then I also teach it in my non majors introductory Gothic class. So I kind of think of it as a representation of a psychological gothic. I've been lucky enough to teach Ulysses to master's students. I do that every other year, I guess. And I also have had this wonderful experience recently where I was able to lead a reading group which was kind of like teaching over the span of a year in the Worcester Art Museum. It's here in Massachusetts, in Worcester, there's this like phenomenal hidden gem of an art museum. And I met monthly with a group of folks who read the novel and we talked about how different parts of the collection in the museum might speak to the different episodes of Ulysses. And that was a wonderful experience. So I've been able to teach Joyce across lots of different time periods, platforms, different levels. I would say that I did, did. I like to think a lot about this question about why he's so popular, because that's sort of part of what motivated the book, right. Like, people wanted to talk about why Joyce is so popular. And I think everybody has their own take on this. For me, though, I think Joyce is phenomenal at representing relationships. Relationships are the core of almost everything, right? I mean, it's hard to think about Finnegan's Wake, Ulysses, Dubliners especially, obviously the dead, without thinking about domestic relationships, relationships between family members, relationships between lovers, relationships, you know, marriage. And I think in this way he kind of represents what we do best as humanists, which is we think about empathy. And empathy is sort of at the core of understanding human relationships. And I think he lucked out. He kind of won the jackpot in terms of history because he just happened to be writing about these relationships when Ireland was becoming a country or a nation. Right. And so when you're writing about relationships and you're thinking about that as the evolution of a nation, you kind of win in some ways because there's. Now you're thinking about how the development of global identity exists alongside the smallest of those experiences of empathy, and it becomes really important. I think that's why. That's my reason why, at least.
- [05:54]
Dan Moran
How about you, Barry?
- [05:55]
Barry Devine
Yeah, and for me, I mean, I didn't quite win the lottery when it comes to my position here. I got hired as a generalist in a very small department. We have three full time faculty here in the English department. So I was hired as the kind of British generalist. But being a Joycean, I sneak in Joyce wherever I can. So my students and other Irish authors as well. So my students kind of get a de facto Irish studies education by the time they're done with their English degree here and just by virtue of taking my class or all of my classes. But for me, I think my approach and the reason that I like teaching Joyce is that it's something that I can build up to and get students excited about. I teach them in my Introduction to Literature courses. I teach them in my British Literature survey courses. I teach them in my upper division themed courses. I developed a course in Irish literature that he's in. I developed a course just on Joyce's work. And so I teach those on a revolving basis. But I usually try to build students up to kind of tackling Joyce. I talk about how Joyce is known to be a difficult and challenging writer. He is a difficult and challenging writer. But I let them know that they're up for the challenge, that they can do this. They can handle tackling Joyce's short stories. They can tackle a Portrait of the Artist as a Young man or even Ulysses, if they practice the skills that they've been learning in, in my class and the other literature classes here. So it's difficult, but it's rewarding. And I think that's the thing that makes Joyce, all of his works so attractive to people is that beyond the difficulty, his works are so rewarding on so many levels. Like Ellen was talking about, you know, his. His portrayal of relationships of all different kinds. You know, interpersonal relationships, relationships between, you know, character and the. The state in which they live, but also just what it means to be human. He captures that, I think, better than just about anybody else in. In literature. And kind of tapping into that and getting the students to kind of empathize with the characters and that humanity is, I think, what's most rewarding for students so, yeah, so, you know, beyond the difficulty, beyond the modernism and the experimental nature of his works, is the humanity that lies underneath.
- [08:45]
Dan Moran
Yeah, I love how both of you talked about that, the relationships and the humanity. Because even when he's at his most stylistically far out, you know, like, we were talking about, like, the Circe chapter or, you know, but it's still about the human beings. And it's amazing how he can get you to feel about humans while. While you're reading something like Oxen of the sun or. Or, you know.
- [09:03]
Ellen Scheibel
Oh, absolutely.
- [09:04]
Dan Moran
So that's. It's amazing. It's amazing thing he's able to do. So, as you two know, more than anybody, there's been a lot of ink spilled about James Joyce. You know, it's like, oh, another book about James Joyce. So talk about your book. What. What's the aim of the collection and how you tried to meet it?
- [09:18]
Barry Devine
Okay. So we have amazing colleagues all over the world, and we've known for years that they are doing really interesting things in the classroom. We talk to our colleagues on social media, on Facebook and on Twitter when that was a thing. We meet up at conferences and just chat about, you know, what we're teaching and how we're going about it. And we learn from each other, and we experiment with things that we learn from each other in the classroom. And so this collection is a way for us to share what all of these very different people and different approaches are accomplishing in the classroom for people.
- [10:04]
Ellen Scheibel
I love to think about the book as a kind of classroom. Like, I like that you were talking about the classroom, because the book itself almost becomes a kind of classroom. Right?
- [10:13]
Barry Devine
Absolutely. And I think that's kind of what it ended up being. I think it started out as a way to get our colleagues to share their ideas with more than just one or two of us at a time at a conference or in a Facebook post that we can get these ideas out there because people have these brilliant ideas and approaches that are worth sharing. And so this collection, I think, is really interesting because it's great for, you know, seasoned Joyceans. People who teach Joyce all the time are going to learn amazing things about this. We're going to pick up new approaches. And I know I've picked up new approaches and new ways about thinking about teaching the way I teach Joyce in my classroom from these chapters. And people who are thinking about teaching Joyce for the first time, I think, are going to gain confidence to do it by reading these chapters and seeing the things that people do in the classroom. And I think one of the most surprising things that came out of this for me is that these chapters are also great for students as well. Any student reading Joyce in a class or trying to tackle Joyce on their own can approach any of these chapters or all of these chapters and find experts holding their hand and walking them through the process of kind of interpretation and understanding in a way that they would get as if they were sitting in a classroom. So, yeah, Ellen's right.
- [11:42]
Dan Moran
This is.
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Barry Devine
It's very much like a classroom, this entire book.
- [11:45]
Dan Moran
Yeah, there's. And I love the combination of theoretical approaches in the book, but there's also, like, really pragmatic approaches. Like, there's that one chapter we'll probably get to that later about, like, you know, you do. So I can't teach Finnegan's Wake. No one could teach it. No one could read it. And then the one chapter's like, well, you can do a sentence. Why don't you do a sentence? And you're like, oh, I could do a sentence. And like. So there's a lot of, like, actual. If you're a teacher and you're nervous, there's a lot of good, like, you know, a lot of good cheering you on. Let's talk about some of the individual essays here. I love that the first one is about teaching Portrait of the Artist to high school students. And I hate the English. You know, I did that for years. I always loved teaching that. It's a great book to teach to young adults. So talk about that opening piece and how it kind of like, you know, strikes. Strikes the note for the rest of the collection.
- [12:25]
Barry Devine
Yeah, I'll tackle this one, too. So Barbara Hoffman, who wrote that chapter, teaching Portrait of the Artist to High School Students, was one of the first people that I wanted to contact about this collection, if not the first person I wanted to contact. I've known Barbara since we were in grad school together at the University of Miami, and we would talk often about her experience in her previous life as a high school teacher teaching a Portrait of the Artist to her high school students, and how much she just loved that experience and how she couldn't wait to be able to teach it again to college students. And so being grad students, you know, I hadn't taught a portrait to anybody yet, so we would talk all the time about things that she, you know, things that she would do in the classroom, ways that she would approach it, things that I was really scared to do in the classroom. And so I learned a tremendous amount from her just as a graduate student. And so based on our conversations years ago, as soon as we have this idea and we knew we were going to include, you know, not only college classrooms, but high school classrooms and secondary classrooms as well, I knew we had to have Barbara's perspective in here because she's such a skilled educator and so passionate about James Joyce and passionate about her teaching and pedagogy that I knew that she was going to write an amazing chapter. And she knocked it out of the park with it, this one.
- [13:53]
Dan Moran
So, Ellen, you mentioned Teaching Dubliners before to a lot of different places. And the first, there's also three essays in the collection about Dubliners. So I want to get your take on this one. The first one is called Teaching Dubliners on the Foundation Year, and that's about the author's experience using Dubliners at Oxford. So can you talk about that foundation year experience and the author's argument about why Dubliners work so well there?
- [14:14]
Ellen Scheibel
Dan, I can talk to you about this. Could I let Barry take the lead on this one, though?
- [14:20]
Dan Moran
Absolutely.
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Ellen Scheibel
So we edited different portions of the book. And this. So this is Lloyd Mabe. It's their essay which is like a quintessential way of thinking about this from a British perspective. So I'm gonna let Barry take this one. And then maybe if you have another question about another chapter, I can take that one, if that's okay.
- [14:40]
Dan Moran
We don't stand on ceremony here on the New Books Network. We're all good here. So, Barry, talk about that first essay.
- [14:45]
Barry Devine
Yeah, that's good. Lloyd Maeve, Houston His Their chapter on the foundation year was such a surprise and so interesting. So the foundation year at Oxford, it's geared toward high school level students so much like Barbara Hoffman's chapter, kind of the same age range. But the foundation year is geared toward kind of traditionally underrepresented students at Oxford. It's a way to get those students on campus, get them in Oxford classrooms to help build some skills and, you know, kind of break the ice a little bit to try to let them know that they are also welcome, you know, at the, at Oxford. And so when they were developing this program, Lloyd Mabe and their program partners wanted a text that met about six or seven different criteria. I can't remember how many there were. They describe in the chapter, but they talk about how they wanted a text that could accomplish all of these different things, that it was, you know, a challenge, that it was appropriate, that it was open to interpretation and all sorts of different things. And all of them agreed that Joyce's Dubliners met or exceeded all of these. And so they decided to go with Dubliners and they decided to focus in their individual classroom, in Lloyd Maeve's classroom, on representations of the body in the Dubliners. Which is really fascinating because there's so many different approaches you can take to Dubliners. But when you have a bunch of high school age students in a classroom who are often very kind of self conscious about their persons and their, their body to begin with, to get them to kind of hyper focus on representations of the body and to kind of dive into that on kind of a theoretical and interpretive level is a really kind of fascinating way to do this. So much like Barbara Hoffman's experience in the US with the portrait, Houston found this to be a rewarding experience, not just for the students, but also for themselves as they were going through this process.
- [17:03]
Dan Moran
And that's like you said before, like you can read that essay as a teacher and say, oh, actually this is a way into Dubliners. Like it's, you know, cause it seems overwhelming. Well, you know, you could use, you know, the body or there's a million ways into it. Right, but that's, that's what I meant about. It's both theoretical and pragmatic. How about there's, there's another one by a professor at Florida Atlantic University. Her name is Julia Veronica Ulin and she talks about. I thought this is really interesting. She talks about teaching the importance of characters, backstories, which seems kind of like. Well, like, of course, like, like you know, when you teach Hamlet, you talk about what happened before the, before the play begins. But that was like really interesting. Like. Cause she says, like there are untold backstories within and beyond the ones that Gabriel's heard, for example, in the Dead. So if either of you could talk about that one, I thought that was a really interesting way to think about like a focal point.
- [17:46]
Ellen Scheibel
It's a super interesting way. And Julianne is a wonderful writer. Before we leave Lloyd Mae behind, though, I do want to mention their book, which is Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health. And the reason I want to mention that is because part of the focus on the body that Barry was talking about comes from Lloyd Mabe's approach, approach to Joyce, that is through sexual health. So if we want to like, you know, jazz it up and think a little controversy here, I think there is, it is controversial sometimes to read Joyce that way because I think we like to think about Joyce as being more about pro sexuality than he is about actually thinking about the Effects of sexuality on the Body's health. So, anyway, I hope everyone will go and read Lloyd Mapes chapter. I want to talk about Julianne definitely, though, because she is one of, I think, the strongest Joyce scholars that we have right now. Gillianne's been working on Joyce for years. She has this amazing book that informs the chapter that she wrote for our book. It's called Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature, where she talks about the influence of backstories. So, Dan, I like your reference to Hamlet a lot, but I have to say it's a little different in terms of what Julianne's arguing because she wants to point out that backstories allow the students to bring their own story to the narrative, right? So, like, the students kind of start to think about their own backstories, right, or their own personal histories and how this brings them to a certain point of interpretation. And that's one of the gifts, I think, about approaching Joyce from the perspective that he is not truth. You know, I think James Joyce would. Would be horrified if we all walked away from Dubliners with the same interpretation of the text, right? I mean, the goal is in that free and direct discourse, the goal is to shift around narration so that you don't always know what the truth is or where the truth lies. I think Julianne takes that one step further by kind of arguing that one way into that, one way to think about Joyce's shape shifting nature of truth or shifting nature of meaning is to think about how minor characters, minor figures, right? Or even minor parts of the environment bring their own story to the text and kind of push you then to think about the text through a different lens. For me, because Julianne and I have talked for many years about teaching Joyce. And for me, one of the ways that I think about applying her method is when I teach the dead, and I've written about this too, I teach it sometimes through the perspective of Freddy Malins. You remember that guy? He's the supposed to do it again, right? And he's like the supposed alcoholic, right? There's like a really brilliant way, though, of thinking about the dead as really influenced by Freddie's backstory, right? Like he has to struggle with this alcoholism that then kind of, you know, erupts at the dinner table scene when he says an inappropriate thing, right? And everyone's like, ugh. And we realize, though, that his inappropriate comment is maybe like one of the most important comments in the story because it's about race. And Joyce was, you know, absolutely preoccupied in some ways with like, American racism. And what was happening with racialization in America during this time. So it becomes an important backstory, but it also becomes a way for students then to think about their own contemporary struggles. Right. All the different ideologies informing their experiences that then bring them into the text. So, de. Centering the narrative. Right. Julianne's arguing that we're thinking differently. She also talks a little bit about Margo Norris in her essay and like Suspicious Readings, which I think also becomes an important way of breaking down where that truth lies. Right. So I. I do think, and I'm. I'm probably not doing it justice because it is so beautifully written. It is one of the chapters that is just so extraordinarily well written that if you had to pull one out, I would say, you know, pull this one. It was. It's excellent.
- [21:57]
Barry Devine
And one thing I really enjoyed about this chapter in particular is that the approach that. That Julianne takes to. To teaching Dubliners can be extracted and used on so many texts. That's not unique to Dubliners. It's not unique to Joyce or his characters. This, I mean, really brilliant technique for engaging students and getting them to deeply read and deeply engage in a text can be. It's portable, and it can be used in a number of texts in a number of ways.
- [22:30]
Dan Moran
Yeah. Because Gabriel gets all the airtime. Right. But if you're like, you know, that's a great. Like, you know, what's the debt about? Well, it's about this drunk guy who's trying to get his life together. And it's like, is. Did you read the same story? You're like, yeah, that's the whole point, right? That's the whole point. So let's talk about the third. The third of Dubliners essay is by Michael Patrick Gillespie, and that has to do with teaching Dubliners where.
- [22:48]
Barry Devine
Yeah. So this was such a surprise, this chapter. So I first contacted Michael to write us a chapter about Joyce's play Exiles, because he and Nick Farnoli are perhaps, like, the world's foremost experts on the play Exiles. And I knew Michael from my time in Miami, so I reached out to him and asked him if he'd write about Exiles. He wrote back and proposed an alternative chapter based on a side project that he'd been enjoying immensely, which was teaching Dubliners to inmates at the Everglades Correctional Institution. So he was teaching Joyce in prison and wanted to write about that experience and asked if that was okay. So I said immediately, yes, of course. That sounds fascinating. And so to me, this was, I think, the most surprising chapter in the entire collection, because it's riveting. From the first sentence, he kind of lays out the entire process of not just teaching, but of getting to the correctional facility, getting into the correctional facility, how sometimes there's something going on at the facility and they turn him away and he can't teach that day. And so just all the challenges of the very act of teaching before he even gets into the classroom and before he can even engage with any of the students. But then he talks about just the immensely rich experience that he's had with the students and how they're so grateful for the opportunity to kind of have this experience in this education. And he was so inspired by writing this chapter that he's now writing an entire book about teaching at Evergrades Correctional. And actually, last time I talked to him, he was sending in final proof. So the book should be coming out really soon. And I can't wait to get my hands on it. This was an absolutely fascinating chapter.
- [24:45]
Dan Moran
One of the surprising subjects in the collection. So that's a big surprise about that chapter. But there's a surprising subject in the collection and it's food. And there's an essay by Talia Abu called Eating with Joyce. And it begins with this very humorous sentence. Ulysses is not easily digested by 2022 students. So talk about that piece, either of you.
- [25:05]
Barry Devine
And I invited Talia to write a chapter for us. And it's funny, I had never met Thalia before. I knew Talia from, I think, Twitter and Facebook. And she and I had exchanged several messages about teaching. And so I thought I would invite her to write a chapter. And this turned out to be such an interesting approach. So Talia Abu teaches in Tel Aviv, Israel, and she explains in her chapter how difficult it can be to get her students on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to relate to people in Dublin more than a hundred years ago. And so she decided to connect them through space and time with food. Something that carries both personal and cultural importance to everybody. Everybody has deep connections with food in one way or another. And so food studies is her field. She's got a phenomenal book out through University Press of Florida. The title of the book is Escaping the Ellen. Do you remember her books title?
- [26:11]
Ellen Scheibel
Yeah, it's called Guilt and Finnegan's Wake.
- [26:13]
Barry Devine
Yes, yes. And it's all about food in Finnegan's Wake. But she devotes a ton of time in this chapter to exploring Bloom's really strange turn to vegetarianism. The last Dragonians episode. And so we know that Bloom eats Meat. The first time we're introduced to Bloom, we get the sentence that Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. And so we know he eats meat. So we see him eat a pork kidney for breakfast. But then he goes to lunch and is disgusted by meat and wants to have a cheese sandwich, you know, at a different pub. So she explores this and dives into this turn to vegetarianism with the students. So. And this chapter is not only intensely informative, kind of about the history of vegetarianism at the turn of the 20th century, but also just culturally about, you know, food and vegetarianism. And it makes you think about food in a different way, and it makes you think about Ulysses in a very different way and the characters involved. It was really, really a fun chapter.
- [27:25]
Dan Moran
We mentioned before about different approaches, if you're a teacher. And I want to ask you about one of these, maybe two of these if we have time. The first one of the. My favorite. My favorite moment in the book is this moment where this professor, Gary Leonard, talks about the ads. And we know that Bloom is an ad canvasser. And as you know, in Ulysses, he's always going around thinking of, like, little scenes and like, oh, that's a good ad. That's a good move. That's a bad move. But he talks about. He would have the students write about an advertisement and judge it as Bloom would. I think that's like, that's such a great way into Bloom's head. So talk about that moment with the soap ad and how Gary Leonard uses it in this classroom. Cause I think the listeners would really enjoy that.
- [28:00]
Ellen Scheibel
Dan, do you know Gary by any. Okay, so, Dan, you have to meet Gary. So the next time we're around each other, if for some reason Gary's there, I'll introduce you. Gary is, like, super well known in the Joyce world. He's super performative. But he's well known because he just might be. And other people are going to listen to this and they're going to be like, scheibel, I can't believe you're going to name this. But he just might be, like, in my opinion, like the foremost, if not one of the top, you know, the foremost literary scholars of psychoanalytic and post structuralist approaches to joy studies. And that's not an easy thing to do. Joyce is already hard. And then you're, like, thinking about Lacan and you're like, thinking about, you know, how to incorporate the ego and how to study these things. Yeah, I would love to be in Gary's class. I'm, you know, I've written to him many times, being like, how can I come? But the beautiful thing about this chapter and this question about how you get your students to do an actual activity that's similar to something that happens in a text, you know, I don't know that people would think about doing that with Joyce, because most of the activities are not things you want to encourage your students to necessarily do. But, you know, thinking about doing this through advertising is pretty brilliant. And for me, at least for Gary's chapter, it's the way that he takes one of the terms that we throw around all the time, but that's really hard to teach to students. And that term is parallax. And he uses that term, parallax, to teach students about why contemporary and, well, modern. But modern and contemporary advertising is so powerful, right? And now I'm going to try to do justice to this, Dan. And if Gary listened to this, Gary, if you're listening, I'm sorry, because I'm sure I am not doing justice to this. But what, what it seems to me that's happening is he, you know, parallax is, is how we understand the distance between a star and the sun, right? And the argument that Gary makes, the argument that Bloom makes, I don't know that it's an argument. Maybe it's part of the definition is that this never happens in just a stable moment in time, right? You have to do it at least twice. You've got to make that measurement twice because otherwise you can't account for the movement of the earth, the shape of the earth, all of these things. Gary argues that Joyce is using this idea of parallax through Bloom to make an argument about the power of contemporary advertising. This is both for better and for worse, right? It's for better because, I don't know, it's how you make money in capitalism is that you get people to look twice, right? You don't just look once. If you can get people to look twice, right, then you know that you have some registration. For Gary, it's the ego. It's the way that we understand our own ego by looking at a commodity, right? And the commodity depends on mobility. So, like movement, the flannel. Bloom walking around the town. He has to be walking when he's thinking about this, right? Because he knows that people are going to encounter advertising when they're walking and maybe when they're, you know, moving around with their newspaper. And so he thinks, how can I create something that's going to make people look twice, right? And also kind of lend its self to, like, that. That power of looking. The power of it. So the mobility of it. The power of it. And anyway, he gets students to think about how commodification makes them feel whole, right? You look twice at that image, you parallactically, right, Approach that image, and it's a commodity, and it makes you feel like some way it's going to complete you, and therefore it's going to help you build this ideal ego, right? And so. And Gary presents this like a beautiful package, right? And then he says, oh, but it's terrible. It's terrible, right? Like, it's the power of commodification in some ways. And it explains also, like, just how very smart Leopold Bloom is. Like, he's a. He's brilliant, right? And he has these, like, understandings of how to apply this to contemporary advertising. You know, I think a lot of modern scholarship wants to take issue with that. You know, advertising is maybe Bloom's downfall, I think, for Gary, right, Because in that chapter, also not to give anything away, but Gary puts his own sign up. He says, this is a sign that I saw when I was driving down the highway, and this is the one that made me feel whole. I won't tell anybody what it says, but just know we had to do some massaging to get that image in the book. You'll see when you look at it. But, yeah, I mean, it's this great way of breaking down that one really important term, explaining how it connects to advertising, explaining why it's powerful to Bloom, and then encouraging students to see if they can understand it. And what this does is then make students walk back, right? You might look twice, but then you're going to think about looking twice. It's when you think about looking twice that matters the most, right?
- [32:56]
Barry Devine
One of the greatest things about this chapter and about Gary as an educator. During COVID he was posting a lot of his lectures online, and if they're still there, it's worth going and finding his lectures online because he's got such a passion and joy for the literature that he teaches, and that comes across in his lectures, and it also comes across in the. His language. In this chapter, you can tell he's passionate about this, and he brings out the fun and the joy and the play in literature. It's just. He's just a delight to listen to and he's a delight to read. This is a really phenomenal chapter.
- [33:35]
Dan Moran
Another concrete practice we get in the book was mentioned before. That's One offered by Paul Fagan, and he has an essay called Teaching the Wikian Sentence. So tell us about this essay and this essay. He explains how he conducts the first lesson on what is surely, I was going to say, like Joyce's most difficult book, but it might be the most difficult book to put on a syllabus anywhere, right? It's difficult to read, much less teach. So talk about that essay, Teaching the Wakeian Sentence, and what, what he shows about what his classroom practice is. Right?
- [34:04]
Barry Devine
And this, this chapter was such a long time coming for Paul. So I, I first heard Paul talk about his approach to teaching Fitigan's Wake at the Trieste Joyce summer school in 2009. I was a master's student and I think he was just finishing his doctorate at that time. And I can't believe that's how long I've known Paul, since 2009. But his approach to perhaps this most difficult novel in the English language, it's mostly in English, I guess, not all of it is. It's mind blowingly simple. He asks you to look for the basic structure of each sentence, subject, verb, object. He demonstrates that Joyce, even through all of his multi page sentences and digressions, keeps the basic grammatical structure of the sentence intact throughout the novel. And when he said that, I was like, that can't be possible. And then he demonstrated it over and over again in his, in his presentation. And it's mind blowing and it's so simple, but it's so effective that once you can find the structure of the sentence, you can kind of mentally diagram the rest of the sentence and put the pieces together and it begins to become more clear. And as soon as I left the summer school, I was in a Finnegan's Wake group at the time. I went back and told the people in the group, you won't believe about this new approach that I just learned. And we all started doing it in the group. And every time I pick up Finnegan's Wake, I was doing that. I was kind of looking for the basic sentence structure every time because of Paul's chapter. So I knew that this had to be part of the collection. So I was hoping that Paul hadn't published it somewhere since then. And it turned out that he hadn't. And so I'm not sure who was happier to get this finally in the hands of readers, me or Paul, because I've been extolling his approach since 2009. I think he's been looking for a home for this chapter and this approach in 2009. And here it is. And it's really, really fascinating.
- [36:11]
Dan Moran
Have either of you tried this with, like, with actual students who are overwhelmed or given them parts of fitting its wake or even a sentence? Have you tried this out?
- [36:18]
Ellen Scheibel
Oh, I've tried it, yeah. I mean, I teach, like, so I. I do something that Joyceans will not be happy about. And I sometimes, in my research methods class, I teach from that book that nobody wants to, you know, talk about, which is called the Portable James Joyce. Right. Because it's segmented. And in that there's, like, that very short part. Right. Of Alp. Right. Finnegan's Wake. And so I have tried it because it's such a short part that's excerpt. It's like a page and a half, I think, in the Portable James Joyce. And so you can actually encourage students, when they've bracketed it off like that, to move line by line. Right. And we've done it, like, in class together, right. Which is super important. So everybody is looking for it together, not asking them to do it before they come in, but actually sitting down and moving through it. I think it empowers people. I think it gives you. I mean, it's chaotic, right? The book is chaotic. And so it gives you, like, a tether, something to help you, like a formula to work through. It definitely made it easier, I think, for the students to talk. I mean, of course, we had to remind everybody what, you know, a subject and a verb and an object was. But, yes, once we got through that, yeah, we've done it.
- [37:28]
Dan Moran
Great. That's great. So here's. Here's the last question, but it's a big one. And both. I'd like both of you to answer this. So there's more essays we could talk about. There's 16 in all. But to wrap up, I want to get your reactions to something you say at the beginning of the collection. Here's what it is. In your introduction, you say this quote, reading James Joyce with others is not only a shared act of intellectual engagement, but an opportunity to build tribal inclusion and ritualistic experience back into our otherwise solitary modern lifestyles. Talk about that.
- [37:59]
Ellen Scheibel
Okay, I'll go first. So I want to say. I want to begin by saying, remember this book was imagined and began to be constructed during COVID During the pandemic. And so we were all, like, especially sensitive to how isolated everybody felt. And the book grew out of an, you know, a Modern Language association conference panel that was on Zoom. So, you know, we were talking about teaching. We had a pedagogy panel during the pandemic right on Zoom. So it was very meta in that moment. So I do think on our mind a lot, and, Barry, correct me if I'm wrong here, because clearly, like, we did talk about this together, on our mind a lot was the difference between being alone and being in a group and what that feels like, you know, And I just want to say, because I didn't get to say this before, I'm not sure there was a space. And I do think this is a good thing to ponder and maybe to end on. You know, we often prioritize in privilege literary criticism that is most definitely textual analysis, right? And that's what we can. We hold in great esteem, that approach. And it is what we all do, what we are trained to do. But writing about pedagogy is also equally important, and I would argue now almost more important, because, you know, pedagogy is in some ways, what's saving us in the humanities. It's what we still are needed for in some ways. And I think writing about teaching, you know, it should be held, I think, in equal importance. And the reason that this text is so powerful is because it's almost impossible not just to teach, but also to read James Joyce by yourself. I mean, I would argue. I think the point of the text is, please don't do that, right? Please don't just sit around and read this in isolation, because not only will you perhaps scare everyone when you emerge from your cave, but also, you know, you may not be digesting, to take Talia's word, the narrative, in the way that you're supposed to, which is. And, you know, heavy pause here. But we are not supposed to be masters of this text. I mean, I. You know, there's a. There's a chapter in the collection by Jonathan Goldman that is very much, you know, it's about teaching, teaching Joyce outside of the classroom and in other ways. Right. Alternative ways of teaching Joyce. And he argues that one of the most powerful moments that comes about for him is when he says openly to the class, I am not a master. Right? I am not a master of this text. I need all of you to be able to have these conversations. And I think that, you know, when we attempt to do something with Joyce, when we attempt to read him, talk about him, analyze him in a vacuum, we lose the most important thing, which is that he. His work, has the power, I think, to not just, like, lead us to communal conversation, but make us interrogate and think about what that community is. Right? What does it mean to be a Community. What does it mean to be human? And this is. To me, this is very much part of, like, being in a tribe. It's very much part of, like, ritualistic behaviors. I mean, Joyce reading groups are ritualistic. Absolutely. And I think it makes you feel, in some ways, like you're part of a community. The goal would be, though, importantly, to never feel or teach as though we are masters of this text. And I. I mean, I think that's what the beauty of, you know, being in a tribe is, in some ways, is shifting power. Right. Not tyranny. And that there is this sense that, you know, you. You are. You might be good at one thing, right. You might know a lot about Irish nationalism. Right.
- [41:40]
Dan Moran
And.
- [41:41]
Ellen Scheibel
And you might read Cyclops and say, oh, I get it. I totally know what this is. And then you might meet somebody who has a Dublin accent, and you might listen to them read the chapter, and then you might be like, wow, I didn't understand this chapter at all. I thought I knew it. You know? But now, listening to somebody who has a Dublin accent, I get totally different things. Right. And that's a different version of mastery. You have to. You know, the argument of the book is you have to have those experiences if you really want to engage with Joyce. It's. It's like what the books demand.
- [42:12]
Dan Moran
Yeah. There's one of the scholars you quote says, you just reminded me, someone says, you don't want to teach Ulysses. You want to teach how to read Ulysses. Because that's Donovan. Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, that's it. That's it. So that's exactly what I flashed on when you were talking. Great. Barry, how about you? What's your response to that statement?
- [42:30]
Barry Devine
I. I want to double down on everything that Ellen said, because that's such a brilliant way to look at our collection and what we put together as kind of this bringing people together into this kind of tribal fold. But I think for me, what brought me to Joyce the first time was I was an undergrad. I worked at a bookstore. I picked up a copy of Ulysses and started reading through it and understood maybe 20% of what I was reading. I was reading it by myself. I didn't understand it, didn't know what I was doing. So I started a book group to read it again and to try to figure out if anybody else could understand this better than I could, to, you know, to try to get some help. And it did. It helped immensely. And as soon as I finished, I wanted to read it again with another group to try to. You know, to get more. And I think it was that it was that kind of communal aspect and that kind of co creation of knowledge together that everybody was bringing in their own perspective and everybody was noticing different things in the text. And it wasn't until I think my, probably my third time reading Ulysses that I felt like I was finally getting a grasp on what Joyce was doing. And today I've. I've read. I don't even know how many times I've read Ulysses, but every time I read it, I discover something new. And it's usually because I'm in conversation with students or people in a group or a colleague who points something out that I had never noticed before. I've read it 25, 30 times, and there's things in there that I've never noticed before or ways to interpret something that I'd never thought of before. So it's the kind of, the endlessly rewarding nature of Joyce's work that can only come from this bringing people together. It can't be done in isolation. If you read by yourself, you're just going to get what's in your own head. You have to bring other people in.
- [44:35]
Dan Moran
That's great because as you both know, you know, if you're in a reading group and you ask everybody to read, I don't know, you're reading an episode from Ulysses and everyone's. Everyone. You ask everyone to pick their favorite moment or a great moment, and you have yours and you're all ready to go, but then all these other people and you're like, how did I miss that moment? Like, I read the save and then they start talking. You're like, wow. I was like, what? But it's. That's what. And Ulysses, of course, is probably the perfect example of that, right?
- [44:56]
Barry Devine
Yep. Yeah.
- [44:57]
Dan Moran
Yeah. So Teaching James Joyce in the 21st Century is published by University Press of Florida. It's available everywhere. Barry Devine and Ellen Scheibel, thank you so much for coming on the New Books Network.
- [45:08]
Ellen Scheibel
Thank you, Dan. Thank you.
- [45:09]
Barry Devine
Oh, thank you.
- [45:11]
Dan Moran
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us
- [45:22]
Ellen Scheibel
on your preferred podcast platform.
- [45:24]
Dan Moran
You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us
- [45:29]
Ellen Scheibel
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- [45:30]
Dan Moran
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