James Joyce’s Teaching Life and Methods: Language and Pedagogy in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” “Ulysses,” and “Finnegans Wake” by Elizabeth Switaj (review)

Elizabeth Switaj claims that the idea for James Joyce’s Teaching Life and Methods: Language and Pedagogy in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” “Ulysses,” and “Finnegans Wake,” published by Palgrave Macmillan, was conceived while she was teaching English in Japan and China (vii). In the study, she looks at biographical works that fail to take Joyce’s pedagogical work into account as a source of inspiration within his writing but asserts that these claims, primarily stemming from Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce (JJII), accept “the general view of Joyce as poor teacher” (xii). In other words, according to Switaj, Joyce’s “linguistic experiments and his depictions of education” are intimately linked to “his experience as a teacher” (xii). For Switaj, Joyce’s classroom work allowed him the space to engage with ideas surrounding language development and learning methodologies which prized experiential education that provided students the space for study as a site of discovery and innovation rather than the by-product of rote memorization. She argues, then, that teaching was more than merely a way to pay the bills for Joyce; that, whether or not he explicitly meant it to happen, his classroom presence invested him within the Berlitz system of 1878 for the teaching of English as a second language; and that the pedagogy of discovery underpins all of his early-twentieth-century work.¹

Switaj’s first chapter provides a biographical overview of Joyce as a teacher. Recognizing that her reading audience may have differing levels of awareness of Joyce’s history, however, she notes, “Readers familiar with the outline of Joyce’s life may wish to skip these pages and go directly to the second part of the chapter” in which she focuses specifically on Joyce’s actual teaching methodology and sources for his approach (xii). This type of focus on the reader provides evidence of Switaj’s own pedagogical philosophy in that it allows space for the reader to select his or her own method for discovering the possible sources of Joyce’s use of predominant teaching methods in both the classroom and his own writing.

Chapter 1, “‘With No Delays for Elegance’: Joyce’s Teaching Life and Methods,” then, draws upon evidence in Ellmann’s biography along with a series of letters by Joyce and his students that discuss his presence as a pedagogue in and outside the classroom. She uses these letters to critique assumptions about what constitutes good teaching in terms of what Joyce’s students experienced. For example, she claims that, by 1904, Joyce’s attitude towards teaching had changed. She writes, “[H]e had gained some awareness of the ways teaching English could offer him a new set of linguistic experiences and understandings that he could use in his writing” (3). Through her extensive research, Switaj points out the problems with Ellmann’s biography, using Joyce’s contact with several of his private students to reinforce her argument. Furthermore, she references a letter to the editor in JJQ by Louis Hyman,

published in the Summer 1976 issue [which] reports that an unnamed student of Joyce’s described his lessons in this period as consistently amusing and engaging, stating that Joyce used jokes and the recitation of poetry to enliven an otherwise dull curriculum and that he was always friendly with his students, both inside and outside the classroom, even loaning a copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to one of them.

(13-14)²

This description of Joyce as a teacher aligns with the Berlitz method of teaching language in that students are introduced to language learning as naturally as possible so that they realize the parts of language that are most meaningful, useful, and interesting to them. Joyce’s affable...