Joyce's "The Dead"--teaching and critical theory.

Abstract

Questions about the rightful place of critical theory in literature courses complicate teachers' decisions regarding theory in their classrooms. My experience of teaching Joyce's "The Dead" at three levels of undergraduate literary study suggests that this particular canonical short story offers guidance in making those decisions and helps instructors reach their pedagogical goals in the areas of literary history, genre, and theory.

Recent scholarship in the areas of critical theory, pedagogy, and literary studies queries the place of political approaches in the study of English yet suggests the unavailability of clear solutions for undergraduate teaching. The founding of the journals symploke: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Theoretical and Cultural Scholarship and Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, as well as the continued success of the MLA's Approaches to Teaching Literature Series, Norton's Critical Editions, and perhaps most important for my discussion, the Bedford Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism Series, imply that theories and pedagogies that focus on political and historical issues not only have not exhausted themselves but are indeed here to stay. In contrast, however, recent texts such as Gary Day's The British Critical Tradition: A Re-evaluation and Eugene Goodheart's Does Literary Studies Have a Future intimate that the time has arrived to interrogate the rightful place for theoretical approaches in the study of literature. Further complicating the matter is Jean Rabate's comment during a conversation on his

The Future of Theory, that

   One of these days, I will teach a class on Theory using only
   non-canonical books. No Derrida, no Lacan, no De Man, no Butler, no
   Bhabba. Just Protagoras, Democritus, Rabelais, Balzac, Bruno, Vico,
   Coleridge, Carlyle, Borges, and a few others.

However, Rabate's rather exclusive list immediately raises questions/objections--No women? No non-westerners? No American people of color?

My paper examines the issue of whether or not the validity of political approaches is the right question. Grounding my discussion in my pedagogical approaches to James Joyce's "The Dead," the last story in his 1914 collection Dubliners, I trace my teaching of this work in three English courses that differ in scope, intensity, and depth and breadth of study--a sophomore level survey course in British literature, a junior level course in the short story, and a junior/senior level course in critical theory for English majors and minors--and conclude that a more valid question might be, what is my responsibility as far as the goals of the students are concerned? In other words, how can I best help them achieve their goals through a judicious offering of formal questions and poststructural literary theories?

My department offers and students take the three aforementioned courses for different reasons. The sophomore level British literature survey draw students from throughout the university, most of whom are fulfilling a general education or English major or minor requirement, and these students bring a wide range of abilities and comfort levels with interpreting texts to the classroom. Therefore, I emphasize close reading and discerning Joyce's formal modernist techniques. The story comes from the assigned course text, The Norton Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2. In spite of Gerald Graft's objections to literature anthologies that

   the assumption that the best way to initiate inexperienced readers
   into literary study is through an ideally preconceptionless close
   reading of the text itself, with as little mediation by supposedly
   "external" factors as possible

is "preposterous," and that "informational headnotes and footnotes" reduce "criticism to its dullest common denominator," my use of an anthology best meets the needs of the students in the course. At my institution, survey courses are in a sense service courses, meant to introduce students from many backgrounds and interests to a fairly broad sweep of history, terms, and contexts with which they might not be familiar. The anthology's headnotes covering modernism and Joyce provide background for the students and the footnotes offer explanations for word use and places in Dublin which might otherwise distract and confuse students as they read. The biographical information on Joyce and the definition of modernism as a literary period give what seems necessary at the sophomore level to contextualize the other artists and periods that we study in the course without asking students to interrogate the invalidity of using history as backdrop as New Historicists might. Furthermore, my goal in classroom discussion is not to further muddle the students' approach to the story by introducing a brand new vocabulary of critical theory espousing psychoanalytical, feminist, deconstructive, or other complex readings but rather to build on the kind of approach they are familiar with from their high school English courses, perhaps their only experience with literature.

Instead, in class discussion, I take a formalist approach informed by some basic reader response questions--What kind of a character is Gabriel? Is he a likeable character? Why or why not? How do you respond to the end of the story? Is it a happy ending? Why or why not? I ask that students always support their answers with textual evidence, thus emphasizing the importance of centering any conclusions in the story itself. And because the students are shaped by their own cultural upbringing, their answers sometimes venture into areas of various theoretical approaches. For example, some students comment on Gabriel's inability to really know Gretta, suggesting a gendered reading of the story in which both women and men suffer from culturally imposed restraints, whereas some remark on his incapacity to integrate himself into the social setting, suggesting a psychological type of reading. These responses intimate that students bring a familiarity with the basic language of theory which they can exploit to enrich their formalist analysis of character without having to be burdened with the responsibility of "learning theory" at the survey of literature level.

The students can also adapt these classroom discussions focused on close reading and formalist aspects such as theme, character, narrative, and symbolism to the short critical essay assignment. Should a student choose to explore "The Dead" in an essay, an abundance of accessible formalist criticism awaits them to support their argument. C. C. Loomis and Florence L. Walzl, for example, examine theme, structure, and symbolism, all relevant choices for the focus of a student essay at the sophomore level and all written from the formalist perspective with which they are most familiar from their high school English classes. This basic approach through historical/biographical background and formalist technique allows non-English majors to reach their goal of completing a humanities course and majors the opportunity to build on what they learn in the survey in their more advanced English courses.

Genre courses, on the other hand, tend to attract students more experienced with interpretation and more English majors/minors; here, my goals include more in-depth discussion of "The Dead" as well as placing it within the context of the evolution of the short fiction genre. I therefore emphasize historical/biographical background to a greater degree. At my institution, these courses are offered at the junior level, and I teach Joyce's "The Dead" in English 317, The Short Story. Again, despite the fact that DiLeo finds anthologies problematic (though on grounds different from Graft's), I use an anthology for the course text. DiLeo objects to anthologies first because they "continue to legitimate and reinforce the primacy of literary texts even if the domain of what is a (literary) text has shifted and the range of things that texts (should) 'say' has changed" and second because

   the "new" progressive cultural studies canon of texts is
   anthologized as though it speaks to the students much the same way
   as the "old" reactionary great books canon did with the proviso that
   what it "says" is different.

Of course, "The Dead" would have appeared in an old "reactionary" anthology but DiLeo's point is that the proscriptive nature of anthologies robs students of the opportunity to engage with texts on their own terms. On the contrary, in this course, students are typically more advanced no matter their discipline and thus come in more experienced with more complex ideas and vocabularies allowing me to broaden our approach to "The Dead" in the classroom.

My introductory material for "The Dead" at first varies little from what I present in the survey course; that is, I provide historical and biographical overviews. In addition, because we have been practicing using the terminology of short fiction--theme, character, setting, plot, point of view, symbolism--throughout the semester, we also apply these concepts to our classroom discussions. However, I also begin to broaden and deepen the historical/biographical scope by bringing in the publication and marketplace issues that Joyce faced in composing both "The Dead" and the collection of which it became a part, Dubliners. As Patrick Sullivan noted in the 2002 article, "'Reception Moments,' Modern Literary Theory, and the Teaching of Literature,"

   We must now ask our students ... to recognize the "multivalent"
   nature of language, to consider literary interpretation as a
   provisional enterprise, and to explore ways that culture
   determines interpretive possibilities. In so doing, we are asking
   them to understand the relationship between art and culture in a
   much more sophisticated way, and we are inviting them to participate
   in intellectual inquiry that is more challenging, responsible, and
   rewarding.

For example, I note that although many short story scholars reify Dubliners as the quintessential short story cycle, in fact Joyce did not at first conceive of the collection as a cycle, publishing several stories separately in journals, and that he wrote "The Dead" after Grant Richards had accepted Dubliners for publication in 1906. I note furthermore that Richards wanted to curtail the number of stories, that he objected to what he called "obscenity" in some of the stories, that Joyce would not compromise, and that the collection was not published until 1914. Raising these factors concerning the real life marketplace stresses and challenges Joyce faced allows us to begin a conversation that leads us away from the ontological and iconic status with which many students have been taught to regard literary creations.

Such material also allows us to develop a basic theoretical framework, in this case a more New Historicist view of the production of literature. Furthermore, when students comment on why Gabriel might be so unsure of himself and feel so isolated from his family, peers, culture, and wife, we can enter into a more explicit and direct discussion of the protagonist's psychological make-up than we might have in the survey. The students' defense of Gabriel as a product of his culture's expectations of men opens up the possibility of gender criticism along with its relevant terminology. These first steps toward critical theory prepare students who wish to write about "The Dead" for some of the more complex issues raised by scholarly responses to the story that move beyond formalism, such as John Paul Riquelme's "Joyce's 'The Dead': The Dissolution of the Self and the Police," with its strands of narratology and reader response, and David Leon Higdon's "Gendered Discourse & the Structure of 'The Dead,'" with its recognition that the male characters in the story require examination beyond their disempowerment of the female characters. This approach allows students to meet their goals of becoming more familiar with the generic characteristics of short fiction, to focus in more detail on one rather than many types of literature, and to build on a basic foundation of literary analysis.

The purpose of and my goals in the critical theory course converge in a design that aims to acquaint students in the discipline with the vocabulary and practice of a variety of literary approaches with an emphasis on poststructuralist movements. The course, taught at the junior/senior level, is entitled "Literary Approaches" and open only to English majors and minors for whom it is a requirement. The course text is from what Higdon calls the "very successful" Bedford Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism series and includes the text of "The Dead" along with biographical and historical contexts as well as a critical history by the editor, Daniel Schwarz, and five critical essays from Psychoanalytical, New Historicist, Feminist, Reader Response, and Deconstructive perspectives, each preceded by an introductory section by series editor Ross Murfin explaining the development and current state of the relevant theory (180). DiLeo believes the series promotes a "trivial use of theory," though he allows that the trivializing may be unwitting. However, I assign not only the casebook, but Charles E. Bressler's Literary Criticism, a text that truly introduces theory in a concise and cogent fashion. Rather than politicizing the classroom, one can thus exploit the teaching of theory to reach a more narrowly defined goal--encouraging students to recognize various approaches as they conduct scholarly research to support their own critical writing in their required upper division and graduate courses.

Students choose a semester text on which they base an annotated bibliography, a literature review, a casebook containing four critical articles developing different strands of criticism, and a critical essay in which they incorporate a fifth strand. None of these assignments ask students to take what DiLeo labels "the 'cookie cutter approach' to theory" which he says "works something like this: apply literary theory 'A' to literary text 'B.'... leading students [to] think that criticism and theory is some kind of game wherein points are scored for the production of valid interpretations." In fact, the critical essay assignment precludes students from taking the "application" approach and reminds them that choosing a theoretical stance allows them to open up a formalist reading of the text in an original and insightful way. In other words, the text remains their primary focus, with the theory taking a secondary role and supporting rather than replacing their analysis.

Paul Allen Miller objects to such a course and its place in the academy stating:

   Unfortunately, theory in most American universities is taught as
   critical methodology. It is taught as "theory": That is, as a body
   of abstract concepts that students can use to produce "readings" of
   texts. The result is a series of ahistorical abstractions that are
   directly "applied" to texts to which they have no articulated
   discursive or dialogic relation.

While Allen's assumption may be true of some university courses, my goal is not for students to learn to "apply" theory but rather to recognize that there are various schools and that they--and theory itself- are ever-evolving, to identify which theoretical approach the author of a critical analysis takes, and to choose among these approaches in their own reading and scholarship to open up familiar texts to fresh interpretations.

In 2003, Horst Ruthrof noted: "[T]here has been published over the last decade or so a stream of books and articles in English in the 'Against Theory' mode," yet he also declared, "It would be a disaster in the present climate if Cultural Studies were to give up on theorizing" for "What we are witnessing right now amounts to a fundamental threat to the secular democratic state." Ruthrof is not alone in taking an aggressively political/ethical position on the issue of theory. My aims in incorporating theory are much more modest, I'm afraid, and motivated by my pedagogical goals. My own conclusion after teaching "The Dead" in these three courses is that in literary studies it is no longer possible to divide the purely formal from the purely theoretical. Students, no matter what they major in, come to the literature classroom well-versed in the language of Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism, and Afro-American studies. These discourses have become part of their daily experiences. They wish to have the value of their reading experiences acknowledged and embraced, just as reading response theorists have advocated. In addition, students welcome information that contextualizes their reading of "The Dead" in the manner informed by New Historicism. To polarize the aesthetic and the theoretical/historical is to present less cogently than we might the texts we attempt to teach and to serve less conscientiously than we should the students who come to our classes desiring to learn how to broaden, deepen, expand, and enrich their reading and writing experiences.

References

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.

Day, Gary. The British Critical Tradition. NY: St. Martin's, 1993. Goodheart, Eugene. Does Literary Studies Have a Future? Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1999.

Graff, Gerald, and Jeffrey R. DiLeo. "Anthologies, Literary Theory and the Teaching of Literature: An Exchange." symploke 8.1-2 (2000):113-28. Expanded Academic. InfoTrac. Winthrop U. Dacus Lib. 28 Mar. 2004 <http://www.galegroup.com>.

Higdon, David Leon. "Gendered Discourse & the Structure of 'The Dead.'" ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners. Ed. Rosa M. Bollettieri Bosinetti and Harold F. Mosher, Jr. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1998. 179-91.

Joyce, Joyce. The Dead. Ed. Daniel R. Schwarz. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. New York: Bedford, 1994.

Loomis, C. C., Jr. "Structure and Sympathy in Joyce's 'The Dead.'" PMLA 35 (1960): 149-51.

Miller, Paul Allen. "The Trouble with Theory." symploke 11.1-2 (2003):8-22. Expanded Academic. InfoTrac. Winthrop U. Dacus Lib. 28 Mar. 2004 <http://www.galegroup.com>.

Rabate, Jean Michel, and Gregg Lambert. "Conversation on the Future of Theory." symploke 11.1-2 (2003):39-53. Expanded Academic. InfoTrac. Winthrop U. Dacus Lib. 28 Mar. 2004 <http://www.galegroup.com>.

Riquelme, John Paul. "James Joyce's 'The Dead': The Dissolution of the Self and the Police." Style 25 (1991): 488-505.

Ruthrof, Horst. "Theorizing: An Incomplete Project." symploke 11.1-2 (2003):54-68. Expanded Academic. InfoTrac. Winthrop U. Dacus Lib. 28 Mar. 2004 <http://www.galegroup.com>.

Sullivan, Patrick. '"Reception Moments,' Modern Literary Theory, and the Teaching of Literature." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 45.7 (2002):568-77. Expanded Academic. InfoTrac. Winthrop U. Dacus Lib. 28 Mar. 2004 <http://www.galegroup.com>.

Walzl, Florence L. "Gabriel and Michael: The Conclusion of 'The Dead.'" James Joyce Quarterly 4 (1966): 17-31.

Siobhan Craft Brownson, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC

Dr. Brownson, Assistant Professor of English, teaches literature, advanced composition, literary theory, and critical thinking courses.