Ulysses as Teacher

BOOK REVIEWS Despite its impressive range of references to canonical authors, Booker's analysis does not throw new light on Joyce's position in the literary tradition. Nor does it offer a new language or theory in our approach to the problems of intertexuality in Joyce. But Booker's study does invite us to revisit Joyce and Bakhtin in light of select members of their illustrious company, to reconsider some of the central themes of the modernist/postmodernist debate, and to ponder the issue of "the anxiety of influence" not so much from the writer's perspective but from that of the reader's. Susan Bazargan Eastern Illinois University Ulysses as Teacher Robert Newman, ed. Pedagogy, Praxis, 'Ulysses': Using Joyce's Text to Transform the Classroom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. viii + 269 pp. $39.50 RECENTLY, I was fortunate enough to teach a graduate seminar on Ulysses and theories of subjectivity. Ulysses is a rich text for exploring the illusions and vagaries of the subject. Indeed, it can illuminate and add new twists to a number of current theoretical debates. I was thus interested in reviewing Robert Newman's Pedagogy, Praxis, 'Ulysses'; it stimulates valuable reflection on the uses of Ulysses in the classroom, although not fully in the direction suggested by its subtitle. Newman's volume covers somewhat different ground than does Kathleen McCormick's and Edwin R. Steinberg's collection of essays Approaches to Teaching Joyce's Ulysses (MLA, 1993), which largely focuses on ways of teaching Joyce's daunting book as effectively as possible. While the essays in Newman's volume imply effective techniques for teaching Ulysses, their main aim is to explore particular issues in Joyce's text, and to demonstrate how teaching and reading Ulysses with these issues in mind can help teachers and students read other texts (novels, film, media, visual arts, pop culture) more critically and effectively. Reading Ulysses from various theoretical perspectives, the essays explore how the text can enrich our understanding of aesthetic movements , patriarchal and colonial ideologies, and the politics of identity, agency, language and representation. Newman remarks, in his introduction , that Joyce "teaches us to read and to think about how we read," encouraging critical reflection on a wide range of issues. As Vicky Mahaffey puts it in the McCormick and Steinberg book, Ulysses is a "pedagogical process" in itself. 243 ELT 40:2 1997 Pedagogy, Praxis, Ulysses consists of sixteen essays arranged in five sections. In different ways, all the essays see Ulysses as a teacher enhancing the study of other texts. In the first section ("Beginnings, Narratives, Identities"), for example, we learn that, in tandem with other texts, Ulysses can teach us the importance of opening lines in orienting our reading (Michael Patrick Gillespie). It can also alert us to "the preemptive power of plot" in shaping experience (Kevin Dettmar) and to the "logic of exclusion" of the other that underpins national identity (Carol Shloss). Finally, Margaret Mills Harper argues that in reading Ulysses with other texts (ranging from Plato's Symposium to Disney's The Brave Little Toaster), we can better understand the role of the sacrificial feast in shaping identity. The second section, "Civilization and its (Dis)Contexts," shows Ulysses teaching its own modernist context, as well as larger issues of subjection and agency. Margot Norris argues that "Circe" illuminates beautifully the "formal distortion[s] and deformation[s]" of avant-garde form. Susan Shaw Sailer uses Molly's bedded situation throughout Ulysses as a basis for examining, in a wide range of texts, the different outcomes possible in the struggle for feminine agency, sexual and creative. Finally, Brian Shaffer shows how "Nausicaa" both illuminates and is illuminated by Freud's analysis of cultural narcissism in Civilization and its Discontents. The essays in the third section, "Ideology and Voice," explore how Joyce's text elucidates the play of strategies and voices in other texts. M. Keith Booker argues that Ulysses's status as both a canonical modernist text and a postcolonial text can "usefully highlight some of the similarities and differences between British and postcolonial writers , both in terms of specific literary strategies or motifs and in terms of broader cultural and ideological...