Proust and Joyce: Two Paths of Modernist Literature

This course introduces participants to two giants of early 20th century modernist literature: Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Explore the opening volume of Proust’s seven-novel epic In Search of Lost Time, and compare them to Joyce’s early short stories and first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Marcel Proust and James Joyce are two giant figures in modernist literature. yet contemporary readers often find their novels very challenging. This course offers an introduction to each writer, and asks how two such different writers can be so influential. By contextualising them with their personal and historical background, this course will show how they turned the events of their lives into art and transformed early 20th century fiction.   Marcel Proust spent fifteen years writing In Search of Lost Time, a seven-volume novel based on Proust’s attempts to join the Parisian haute-bourgeoisie of the pre-World War 1 years. In the first volume, Swann’s Way, his eponymous main character charts his idyllic childhood and his entry into Parisian society. And through the cautionary story of Charles Swann and his love for the courtesan Odette, Proust offers an exquisite portrayal of love and jealousy, the aesthetic pleasures of literature, and a sharp satire of a glittering social world in its dying days.   Meanwhile, James Joyce, an Irish-Catholic writer from an impoverished background, escaped the restrictions of turn-of-the-century Ireland and wrote back to the society that tried to stifle him. His short story collection Dubliners offers an acerbic portrayal of the misery and despair of colonial Ireland. Meanwhile his coming-of-age novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows the struggle of the would-be poet Stephen Dedalus to escape poverty, religion and middle-class morality in his desire to create art.

Note: No French is required for this course. Proust will be read in the Scott Moncrieff translation.

Advance Reading

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans Scott Moncreiff (Vintage Classics).

James Joyce, Dubliners (Oxford World Classics)

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Oxford World Classics

Course Outline

Week One

Week Two

About the Tutor

Dr Angus McFadzean is a lecturer specialising in British and American Literature and Film. He is the Program Director of the Oxford University Summer School for Adults and teaches on international programmes for the Continuing Education Department. He is the author of Suburban Fantastic Cinema: Growing Up in the Late Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2019) and the editor of James Joyce’s Epiphanies: A Critical Edition (University of Florida Press, 2023). He holds a doctorate from Wadham College, Oxford on James Joyce and the Aesthetics of Transgression. He has published on James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon and Hollywood cinema and has taught widely on literature of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century, specifically modernism and the works of Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and WB Yeats.