Joyce's toolkit

Taking each book individually, we will use close textual study to discover themes, epiphanies, imagery and how narrative is used to challenge world-views and claim identity.The Odyssey is a root for our understanding of ourselves as well as the words and ways of the ancients. How does it continue to shape our idea of the heroic? What do the dilemmas that Odysseus faces offer to us today? Can we still appreciate the lyric and narrative quality alongside a violent story filled with the suffering and death of nameless servants, slave girls and soldiers?Hamlet finds himself trapped in a rotten Denmark surrounded by divided loyalties and suspicious rulers. He is haunted by the mysterious death of his father the former king and disgusted by Claudius, his new father-king. He struggles to understand a world where the actions of man seem so full of greed and power lust—and how to act with integrity in such a world. Themes include the most precise questions of loyalty, revenge and allegiance, what it means to be human, the role of fate and self-will, the truth of madness- the essences of human experience.A Portrait … attempts to enter in to the consciousness of a boy growing to young adulthood with an acute sense of the world around him. For Joyce, the true artist must transcend the nets of culture, history and religion to discover his vision, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” In the narrative, the writer attempts to collapse the boundary between reader and character consciousness: there is no authorial presence or exterior perspective and each section is written as though it springs directly from the thoughts of the boy at the time. In fact, some have argued that the opening page contains the entire meaning of the rest of the book. But you have to read the whole thing for the layers to come through.