“Copied Out Big”

This chapter argues that James Joyce’s Ulysses seeks to counter the labor-saving and “liberating” discourse of progressive education, a discourse that begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and culminates with John Dewey. Joyce reimagines the pensum, or the punitive copying-out of text, as a model for both his own creative practice and his readers’ experience. This becomes especially vivid in Ulysses’ fourteenth episode, “Oxen of the Sun.” Here, copying the styles of others in a series of painstaking prose pastiches, Joyce also sends his readers back to school, administering a version of the labor-intensive instruction that he thematizes even while he also considers the labor that takes place in the maternity ward in which “Oxen” is set. Against Dewey’s demand that teachers do away with wastes of time for the sake of students’ freedom, Joyce sets these very wastes to work. As he makes the past palpable as dead weight that is not for all that dispensable, Joyce challenges the reproductive heteronormativity, as well as what Elizabeth Freeman would call the “chrononormativity,” that marks progressive educational theories from Émile through Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Joyce suggests strikingly that it is the old school, not the new, that shelters queer forms of life.