ENGL W3230

Two sets of three journal entries (1 pp. each) and a midterm (Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and final (Ulysses).

a lot of difficult reading although it is diffused through out the semester. you read Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses. No Finnegan's Wake which I was quite happy about come the end of the semester (U. is exhausting). Two short 3-4 pagers responding to passages and a final paper of 2000-2500 words.

Tough, but totally manageable. A fair amount of reading sometimes (the chapters in Ulysses are long), but if you plan well it's doable. Several (maybe 3?) one-page response papers due in discussion section. Also, 3 wiki page "projects." She has you work in groups to complete wiki pages on Courseworks about a specific theme in Ulysses, and you update them twice (so a total of 3 postings). If your group members are competent, this is fine and actually a good way to organize your thoughts about the novel. One final 10 page paper.

Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses read in full, plus miscellaneous essays and excerpts. 5-7 page paper on Ulysses, annotated bibliography, presentation, and short final. A lot of very dense reading for the small amount of time. Accept that you will toil for 6 weeks only to scrape meekly the surface of the books--especially Ulysses.

Great man, warm and very approachable, though it is true what the other reviews say here that taking a class with him is really more like taking a class in Seidel Studies. He has his own personal lens through which he would like the works interpreted and as long as you remember that and remember that new ideas are appreciated but only if they don't stray too far from the approved of reading done in class, you should be fine. He is a generous grader, the classes are a pleasure to attend, the work is very manageable and he does do his best to make the material as interesting as possible. He genuinely cares if you understand the reading and he is not the type to demand impossible feats of memorization or in-depth textual analysis. However, again to emphasize, he doesn't structure the course very well, so you will end up with highlights of Joyce, passages he finds interesting in some way, but you won't necessarily know why they are important to Joyce or why Joyce wrote the way he did, so definitely a mixed bag if you are really looking to get something out of the class. Not a GPA killer, not a change-your-life type of class, but somewhere in between. Seidel can be very funny and his anecdotes are always great.

This class was one of the best academic experiences I've had. Kitcher is a fantastic lecturer; very clear, well organized, and detail oriented. He structured the class in an accessible way, starting off with the "easier" books and working into Ulysses, which took up the majority of the semester. We went one chapter per class through U., which is the only way to really study the book in detail, with all its intricacies and nuance. It's a lot of tough reading, but very rewarding, and I can't imagine that there is a better professor out there with whom to study this material. Kitcher has read all of these books many times (as he admitted in class, and as is evident as well from his depth of knowledge), which is quite an asset in a professor for a first-time reader of Joyce. This literature is unique in that it takes a lot of guidance to even get the basic techniques and premises, not to mention the subtleties and upper-structural elements, and Kitcher did a great job of not losing sight of this fact. He always kept his lectures grounded in the foundations of the three books while also hitting upon more subjective or elusive material. I found that as I became comfortable with the former, the latter started to become more and more interesting and rewarding to study. Take this class if at all possible. It's worth it even for non-lit majors.

Sarah Cole is perfect. Someone in an earlier review called her a goddess, and this is completely true. Her lectures were both intellectually stimulating and hilarious every time. She loves Joyce like an old friend and knows an immense amount about his life and contemporaries, as well as other Irish and British literature, which was really helpful to contextualize Joyce's work. We spent the first few weeks reading Dubliners and Portrait, and then spent the rest of the semester on Ulysses. This was the perfect set up, because even considering the book's enormous size, we were able to go at a decent pace and usually had time to thoroughly discuss each section. The class had about 70 people or so, but Professor Cole somehow fit in time and managed discussions fairly often. She would stop at certain points in her lectures and ask for students' opinions—and she was great at cutting off annoying, long-winded people! She is also very accessible and seems to care about what you think. While the discussion sections vary in quality based on which TA you have and who is in your section, Prof. Cole grades the final paper, and her comments were very interesting. Also, can't leave this review without mentioning her wardrobe. I wanted to steal everything she wears (well, most things—some of it is just insane). But she has a new outfit for every class, and they are all fabulous. She may look l…

Prof. Gold has taught the summer version of James Joyce twice. I am not sure if he will teach it again, but I would hesitate to take this course. Prof. Gold's lectures were passable but not great until Ulysses, where he fell ridiculously behind schedule and often seemed unable to present coherent ideas, identifying small themes here and there. He barely covered chapter 6 in the second last class, but assigned our last paper on chapter 11 and our final on 12 in order to force us to get to the ending. How he could do that in good conscience continues to puzzle me to this day. Joyce is difficult to read, even more so to teach, and syllabus was basically impossibly ambitious given the compressed summer schedule. But Prof. Gold made things worse by requiring a presentation from each student. While some of the presentations were good, none (mine included) were worth the precious class time. The research assignment--summary of an academic paper on Ulysses and two evaluations of it--was supposed to help our papers but was completely useless. Prof. Gold appears somewhat abrasive, but is at base a nice guy who is always ready to help. He clearly loves Joyce and knows a lot about him, although his presentation was not always lucid. I do think his course could have been a good experience--and it was not terrible--if he did away with the frivolities and focused on delivering good lectures.

Around 150-200 pages a week, 2 sets of b.s. journal entries (2 sets of 3 one-page papers and a 3-4 page paper due with the second set), laughably easy 20-question reading quizzes for the midterm and final.

A hard 3-page paper, an easier 6-page paper, a tough final that's mainly IDs from Ulysses. Grade on the final seems horribly arbitrary.