Switaj, Elizabeth Kate
The Fame of an English Teacher: James Joyce and the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language
From the time James Joyce left Ireland in 1904 until he moved to Paris in 1920, he supported himself and his family, in large part, through the teaching of English as a Foreign Language. He began by teaching for Berlitz, first in Pola and then in Trieste, worked for a similar school in Rome, and was eventually hired by the Scuola Superiore di Commercio “Revoltella” school, which would later become the University of Trieste. He also taught numerous private lessons. Though most biographers have portrayed his teaching negatively, Joyce was in fact a popular and effective teacher, as the first chapter of my thesis argues.
The remaining chapters of this thesis seek to trace the influence of this employment on Joyce’s fiction through an examination of the language of and depictions of pedagogy in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. In particular, his teaching work shaped his understanding of the development and acquisition of language. His employment also helped him to refine his ideas about the role of questions and text selection in education.
In addition to working on the thesis, I also currently have an internship with Irish Pages (www.irishpages.org).
Supervisors: Professor Brian Caraher and Dr Andrea Mayr
