These days literary scholars are preoccupied with ‘what you want to make of a text’, mostly dismissing ‘what it wants to make of itself’ and ignoring ‘what it wants to make of you’.

It’s 1990 and I am in a Joyce seminar in grad school, and we students (there’s about 15 of us) are supposed to run the class: the Prof regularly chimes in, but we are collectively in charge of conducting the two-hour seminar and every other week we are expected to take on a chapter of Ulysses and teach it to the others. Usually this involves linking it up with its sources, chasing down its allusions, etc. etc., and then patiently taking the class through a “close reading”……