“The Speculation of Schoolboys”: Confronting the Academy in Ulysses

Abstract

We face an inherent paradox as instructors of world literature. Although we present our students with texts that often challenge the norms of formal academic discourse, we simultaneously ask our students to respond to these texts in written assignments that enforce the very same norms. Requiring students to embrace these norms in their own writing often undermines the authors under consideration; enforcement of the formal academic standard foregrounds the underlying Western value system—clarity, directness, linearity, and so onthat many authors in the world literature cannon resist. Moreover, the formal standard mitigates the revolutionary potential of the ideas presented in world literature by reinforcing the type of intellectual training that, Lynn Bloom argues, “promulgates the middle-class values that are thought to be essential to the proper functioning of students in the academy” (656).¹ Within our curriculum, then, we must locate opportunities where students can enact—not merely observe—techniques and writing strategies that complicate the implicit values of formal academic discourse; we must locate opportunities where students can demonstrate their understanding of a text not by merely recycling a prescribed form, but by authoritatively establishing their own voice.