1st Edition
James Joyce and Education Schooling and the Social Imaginary in the Modernist Novel
James Joyce and Education is the first full-length study of education across the Joyce oeuvre. A new account of how the politics and aesthetics of the Joyce text is informed by historical contexts, it is the latest contribution to the growing contemporary debate about education, late modernism and literary innovation.
This highly original account reads Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in new and challenging ways. It produces the Joyce text as a complex and comic devotion to the representation of schooled education — an exemplification of the elitism that state schooling was historically designed to reproduce and a devastating undoing of the epistemologies it was designed to sustain. Chapters explore a range of themes, including Joyce and radical education, the impact of Nietzsche’s writing on Joyce and women and education.
The book will appeal to researchers, scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of literature in education, pedagogy, Joyce scholarship and modernism.
1. Contexts and their problematics 2. ‘Pinocchio! Oh Pinocchio! You’re a boy! A real boy!’ — boyology and stories of childhood in Pearse and Joyce. 3. ‘Is it with Paddy Stink and Mickey Mud?’ — systemization and portraits of the artist as schoolboy 4. Early Joyce and radical education 5. A Portrait of the Artist and the cultural politics of the public school novel 6. Education and the social worlds of Ulysses 7. Ulysses and the age of informatics 8. Joyce and the textbook — ‘Oxen of the Sun’ and ‘Eumaeus’ 9. ‘I’m not so ignorant’ — women and education 10. ‘Come si compita cunctitititilatus?’ — education and Finnegans Wake 11. Bibliography
Biography
Len Platt has published widely on modernist literary culture, especially on the works of James Joyce. He is also a leading expert on early musical theatre and on the exchange and transfer practices that made it a characteristic culture of conservative popular modernism at the fin de siècle.
"Len Platt has produced a ground-breaking book. Joyce and Education is a forensic exploration of how Joyce's work engages with both the social and psychological aspects of schooling. Platt exposes how the structure of schooling and education at the time Joyce was writing, produced hierarchies and elites - something that endures within the education system of the here and now.This scholarly account is highly informative, readable and often amusing. This is a text not only for James Joyce scholars but for all who are concerned with how education policy and practice work to maintain social order and the status quo." - Rosalyn George, Professor of Education, Goldsmiths, University of London
