 For four decades, he taught some of the most popular literary criticism courses in the curriculum.He pioneered a method of reading Joyce's most difficult novel "Finnegans Wake" with a small group of graduate students, everyone adding a bit of their academic knowledge to the task.He called this Reading by Committee, saying that the group brought to it "a variety of languages and learning, [and] might do more with the book than I alone, with small learning and less Greek."