Hidden Grammar: Shakespeare, Joyce, and Girard

William Shakespeare, James Joyce, and René Girard walk into a bar... 

And share a secret: the price of literary genius is the torment of mimetic cuckoldry, resolved through a type of repentance. I talk about how Girard found this secret in Shakespeare, and how Joyce had already encoded it in a single chapter of Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus, presenting his Shakespeare theory to a roomful of erudite groundlings, ends up outcast as their scapegoat. The mob wins in the short term, but the artist persists.