Dublin Streets to Caribbean Beaches: Reading Joyce and Walcott

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course begins with the premise that the twentieth-century situations of Ireland and the Caribbean bore more than a passing resemblance to each other. In a 1979 interview, Derek Walcott (the first Caribbean writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) claimed affinity with Irish writers on the grounds of a shared colonial background: "I've always found some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because one realised that they were also colonials with the same kind of problem that existed in the Caribbean - Now, with all of that, to have those astounding achievements of genius, whether by Joyce, or Yeats, or Beckett, illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, deprived, oppressed situation, and be defiant and creative at the same time." To explore this assertion, we will read selected writings of James Joyce (Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist) and Derek Walcott (St. Lucian poet, playwright, and essayist). This comparative reading will highlight their common themes of ethnicity, postcolonial constructions of masculinity, cultural chauvinism, and political inequality. Both work within and against the traditional Western canon, and so our primary focus on their epics, Ulysses and Omeros (we will read selections from each), will consider the ways that Joyce and Walcott are writing back to the imperial center/rewriting the imperial canon, employing its literary techniques and traditions in their works. Both writers thematically investigate the dichotomy between colonizer and colonized, the interplay between their own culture and Western civilization writ large, and the influence of island geography on their societies. Their writing exposes the lasting wounds - personal, cultural, and political -inflicted by British colonialism in their native lands and the ways that anxieties of masculinity were exacerbated by and contributed to this domination. Our readings of Joyce's and Walcott's texts will be guided throughout by the theoretical lens of masculinity studies. This course is open to students interested in exploring the ways that masculinity studies serves as a useful lens for reading Joyce and Walcott and for analyzing the political and cultural ties between their homes (as well as their problematic relationships to those homes); no prior knowledge is assumed.