A portrait of the researcher as a young teacher

Abstract

As an account of the reflections of a researcher and teaching assistant, this chapter details my preparations for and moments of discovery in the classroom while discussing James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Teaching a group of advanced MA students registered for a four-credit survey course “Twentieth Century British Literature and Thought” was in many ways a rewarding experience. Beginning with my preparations for presenting a work of such complexity as Portrait before a group of students, the experience also made me sensitive to the challenges of teaching a modernist novel in general and Joyce’s ideas of fiction in particular. This class, made up of students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, also raised many interesting questions related to teaching English at college/university level, and has made for participatory, responsive discussion. How could students begin to contextualize Joyce and place his reputation for “obscurity” against the larger tendencies and concerns in modernist fiction, while also beginning to grasp the polemic of the Irish question and the political unconscious of Portrait? Drawing a parallel between research and teaching methods, this essay aims to explore some ways in which one might begin to read Joyce in the classroom, with Portrait serving as the “smithy” in which readers are crafted and made.