51³ÉÈËÁÔÆæ

Course Description

Summary

When asked to define "claritas," our (shall we dare say?) hero Stephen Dedalus in Jame Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man responds thus: "The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that CLARITAS is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so." But is it, really, mere "literary talk?" Such will be the subject of our investigations as we inhabit the worlds of Dubliners, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. Ancillary readings and investigations will include St. Thomas Aquinas, critical essays, portions of pre-Socratic philosophical texts, religious texts, as well as historical and cultural considerations of the verge of Modernity alongside the plight and lives of Dubliners.