Prometheus ( p r ə ˈ m iː θ i ə s prə-MEE-thee-əs; Greek: Προμηθεύς took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour. One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like. A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes. With words that made them known. Shakespeare, 1. 2. Caliban’s reply, almost a second introduction, this time by himself: You taught me language; and my profit on’t. Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you. For learning me your language Shakespeare, 1. 2. Language is power, not only as a marker of self- expression, but as one of the civilization and, perhaps more importantly, artistry. It is Prospero’s command of language, much like Mulligan’s, that enables him to continue this twisted master- slave, master- student relationship. I propose that this brief, yet deeply intertextual moment is a critical lens through which to examine the rest of Ulysses. I plan to trace this paradigm first through the Telemachiad, honing in on Joyce’s combined incorporation of Ariel’s song into Stephen’s extended meditation on a corpse on the beach at the close of “Proteus. ” “Aeolus” is likewise a point of interest as it most directly addresses Joyce’s preoccupation with rhetoric and style, and Stephen’s linguistic reticence, self- consciousness, and susceptibility to persuasion. I also plan to examine the various mentions of Tempest in “Scylla and Charybdis,” particularly those focusing on Prospero and his powers of artistry. This helps to open up a conversation about Shakespeare’s other romances. Of the already minimal scholarly discussion of these plays, there is still less on Pericles, Cymbeline, and Winter’s Tale than Tempest. I contend that the relevance of Winter’s Tale has been particularly overlooked, and that Stephen and Bloom’s frequent corrupted references to this text have important implications for Ulysses’ linguistic and artistic schematics. Firstly, the Bloom family unit is uncannily similar to Shakespeare’s Sicilian royalty, most notably in the unspoken grief of both protagonist’s lost sons, and the ways in which the authors address the modes of atonement and recovery. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to draw connections between Stephen’s cynical discourse on wives in “Scylla and Charybdis” and Bloom’s museum musings in “Lestrygonians” as the King’s competing theories of female sexuality. Both men think and verbalize permutations of Leontes’ angry ramblings in Act I Scene II, and both scenes are contextualized by discussions of linguistic and artistic control—here, one and the same—and perhaps more importantly, explicit discussions of attaining freedom through those mediums. While I have less experience with Pericles and Cymbeline and their particular employment in Joyce’s work, I think there is a lot of potential supplemental material on the gender politics and the place of women in Ulysses’ larger schematics on the role of mastery of language in self- presentation. As yet, I am uncertain of the role of scholarly research in my thesis plans. The only substantive body of work on this topic as yet is largely concerned with Caliban’s potential Irishness, and the difficult dynamics of artistic self- definition for a colonized island. My planned methodology is, admittedly, largely internal to Joyce and Shakespeare’s work, even closed- off from much current scholarship. I hope to counteract this potential danger with a firm grounding in the precise intellectual history surrounding Shakespeare’s romances in early twentieth century Ireland. Model Proposal 2. Pranks, Winks, and Knowing Artifice: J. D. Salinger as a Master Trickster“I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye While enduringly popular with the American reading public, particularly young people and aspiring writers, the works of J. D. Salinger have, somewhat perplexingly, failed to generate much in the way of serious scholarship. Shortly following the near- universal acclaim of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger’s “Franny” and “Zooey” and subsequent installments meditating on the Glass family were met with increasingly critical resentment and weariness of Salinger’s devotion to a set of precocious, misunderstood geniuses, so much so that by the time “Hapworth 1. The New Yorker in 1. Malcolm). Since then, many authors and fans have sought to redeem Salinger from a writerly perspective (Samuels; Kotzen and Beller), while his status in the world of literary criticism remains uncertain. What qualities do readers (especially writer- readers) admire in Salinger’s stories And what about these qualities and others make Salinger’s body of work difficult or unappealing from a critical standpoint