the passage below is from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, originally published in 1916. In describing the elementary school experience of its protagonist, Stephen Daedelus, it highlights some of the routinized aspects of classroom activity:

A voice from far out on the playground cried:
-All in!
And other voices cried:
-All in! All in!
During the writing lesson he sat with his arms folded, listening to the slow scraping of the pens. Mr Harford went to and fro making little signs in red pencil and sometimes sitting beside the boy to show him how to hold his pen. [Stephen] had tried to spell out the headline for himself though he knew already what it was for it was the last of the book. ZEAL WITHOUT PRUDENCE IS LIKE A SHIP ADRIFT. But the lines of the letters were like fine invisible threads and it was only by closing his right eye tight and staring out of the left eye that he could make out the full curves of the capital. (Joyce, 1997, p. 37)

Routine and order pervade the time and space of this classroom: A call of "all in" brings the students into the classroom. At a pre-determined time, students are taken from one clearly defined space (the playground) to another (the classroom). The space of the classroom, as Joyce later indicates, is one that is ordered in rows, overseen from the head by the teacher (Mr. Hartford). Once at their places in the classroom, students are expected to engage in a highly focused activity: The work of writing in which students copy down sentences, and in so doing, learn how to form letters and also how to hold their pens. The interface or relational strategy here --the visual and motor space that is opened up for the writing student-- are constituted by page, pen, book and desk.

The body in Joyce's description is foregrounded in a number of significant ways. The arrangement of page, pen, ink and desk requires particular embodied comportment and even discipline: Students are required to sit still in their rows of desks, and to apply themselves to the physical and intellectual task at hand. The reason that the protagonist views this earnest activity as a passive onlooker in the description above is because his glasses had been broken in the playground. It is also in this connection that the dimension of lived body becomes important: Stephen’s experience here is of a person who is largely excluded from the space of the text and of writing because of a significant (albeit temporary) bodily handicap. He can only make out the most obvious letters or shapes when he squints.