Joyce Scholarship Research Articles

Wilder’s Joyce: Inspiration, Borrowing, Appropriation, Plagiarism

American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder’s lifelong attraction to and passion for if not obsession with the work of James Joyce has led to unintended consequences. Wilder was writing what would become his second Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth, while in the midst of “unriddling” Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake. Accusations of plagiarism would subsequently arise from two major Joyce scholars, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson as they raised questions about the tipping point in creative practice, the point at which common practices of textual influence and reference cross the line into excessive borrowings and plagiarism. Such accusations, which Wilder failed to acknowledge and to fully address in a timely fashion, have lingered to his discredit and have obscured his achievements both as a playwright and a major scholar of experimental literature with a particular emphasis on James Joyce. The essay details the need to return to and to reassess the issues of Wilder’s creative practice within the current theoretical climate of intertextuality and thus to reassess Wilder’s pioneering work on both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes

The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes

A Wilder Joyce: Influence, Borrowing, Appropriation, Theft

This article re-examines the unintended consequences of American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder’s lifelong passion for the work of James Joyce, as Wilder was writing what would become his second Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth, while in the midst of ‘unriddling’ Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake. Subsequently, accusations of plagiarism arose from two major Joyce scholars, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, who not only questioned the borrowings of a particular playwright in creating a new artwork for the stage but also challenged the practices of commercial theater and contemporary theories of originality and textuality. Exploring The Skin of Our Teeth as an intertext, on the other hand, simultaneously validates Campbell and Robinson’s initial assessment and encourages a rethinking of Wilder’s commitment to Joyce as both a scholar and something of a collaborator. Such a shift would allow the critical community to ask theoretical questions about how this ‘collaboration’ works to afford accessibility and so opens Finnegans Wake to a wider audience. Wilder might thus be seen as offering something like a thematic catalogue to the novel in parallel to the ‘theme keys’ he outlined in his Joyce journals. Such recalibration would reposition Wilder’s contributions, not only as an American playwright but as a pioneering critic and crusading intellectual: a European-focused writer wholly in the American grain, an avant-garde champion like his compatriot Edmund Wilson, one who could recognize, invoke, and engage simultaneously with the European avant-garde and the American theatrical and critical traditions.

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

The Necessary Fiction: Life with James Joyce's "Ulysses," by Michael Groden

Reviewed by: The Necessary Fiction: Life with James Joyce's "Ulysses," by Michael Groden Jonathan Goldman (bio) THE NECESSARY FICTION: LIFE WITH JAMES JOYCE'S "ULYSSES," by Michael Groden. Brighton, England: Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2019. xi + 276 pp. £65.00. Editor's Note: this review was composed and sent to the JJQ before the passing of Michael Groden, to whom we will pay tribute in a forthcoming issue. We are printing the piece as submitted, without edits reflecting the loss of the author and critic. Michael Groden's The Necessary Fiction carves out a distinct niche within Joyce studies, which is fitting, since Groden has done the same. The book chronicles the author's personal and professional development alongside his affective engagement with Ulysses over half a century as well as his critical assessment of the novel as a humane, empathetic work. Ulysses functions as a prism through which Groden views his memories and reckons with his personal struggles; in return, his lived experience shapes his understanding of Joyce. Acknowledging the mash-up nature of The Necessary Fiction, Groden mulls over possible descriptors, including "bibliomemoir" and "shelfie" (13), but he takes a wider scope than these terms suggest. He offers, for example, a fifty-year overview of Joyce's legacy and Joyce scholarship, with special attention to genetic criticism. Addressing a less specialized audience, Groden reflects, like the best memoirists, on memory, writing, and the authorial subject. Novice Joyce readers are assumed, as Groden includes a guide to Ulysses' episodes. The Necessary Fiction moonlights as a love story, which is most significant to Groden: he signals that the book is a valentine to the poet Molly Peacock, just as Ulysses is Joyce's tribute to Nora Barnacle. Like a true comedy, such as Ulysses, the book ends with a marriage– not a wedding, but a marriage–that of Peacock and Groden, which has spanned the last three decades. All of this is rendered with humility and humor and a sometimes unnerving candor. Groden explains: "I can't try to answer my questions about Ulysses' strong appeal to me without opening the doors on my own privacy to look at the rough draft of myself in progress" (13). This openness underpins the depictions of family and romantic spheres, his mental and physical health crises, and the self-assessment of his development as a person. The Necessary Fiction moves chronologically through Groden's life and career, frequently digressing to relate its narrative to Ulysses, and occasionally to Joyce's biography. Groden tells of his pedestrian, middle-class, secular Jewish upbringing in an industrial, economically depressed Buffalo, New York, with himself an exceptionally James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 4 (Summer 2021), pp. 557-588. Copyright © for the JJQ, University of Tulsa, 2021. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved. [End Page 557] shy youth, studious, fascinated with numbers, patterns, and hidden order (which, he notes, conditions him for manuscript study). The fraught relationships with his parents he compares to portrayals of mothers and fathers in Ulysses that he would absorb years later, lingering to elaborate on his lifelong admiration for Leopold Bloom, for Joyce's construction of a compassionate and empathetic father, husband, and community member. In high school, Groden meets Peacock, a moment he likens to his first exposure to Ulysses, triangulating their encounter through the legend of Joyce's first date with Barnacle, the Ulysses use of the song "When First I Saw That Form Endearing" (85), and Beatles lyrics.1 (The book is peppered with Beatles and other rock references.) The romance, erotic exploration, and eventual breakup with Peacock drastically expand his worldview. They date through their first year of university, by which point Groden has discovered Joyce. Now the memoir takes off. Groden first opens Ulysses in his first semester at Dartmouth College, as the first reading assignment of his first literature class, taught by Peter Bien. He is "smitten" (8), "infatuated" (34), and, two years later, a committed English major; two years after that, he applies to graduate school. Alongside this history, Groden depicts his romantic travails, soon arriving at Sally (last name not given). The two marry, though not for long, and for...

Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature: Portraits of the Artist as Reader and Teacher by Dhooge Ben (review)

REVIEWS 769 notes, modern Russian crime writing — such as Boris Akunin’s series about fin-de-siècle detective Ernst Fandorin — looks back to its nineteenth-century origins in order to continue tackling questions of authority and truth in a society where legal decisions are often stranger than fiction. University of Exeter Muireann Maguire Dhooge, Ben and Pieters, Jürgen (eds). Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature: Portraits of the Artist as Reader and Teacher. Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, 62. Brill Rodopi, Leiden and Boston, MA, 2018. ix + 226 pages. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $127.00. This volume features critical readings of some of Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures, including those on Austen, Cervantes, Chekhov, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Stevenson. Nabokov’s monograph Nikolai Gogol is also given consideration. The volume originated in part from a conference on Nabokov’s lectures at the Royal Academy in Brussels. Following an introduction, the volume’s chapters are divided into three parts: ‘Part 1: Teacher among Authors’, whose essays evaluate Nabokov’s approach to the texts he taught; ‘Part 2: Critic among Critics’, which focuses on the materials and sources Nabokov used; and ‘Part 3: Author among Authors’, whose essays tease out how Nabokov’s own aesthetics and literary works resonate with the texts featured in his classes. Many of the essays accomplish all of these tasks to some extent (and unfortunately, none of them bestow upon Nabokov a grade for his efforts). In part one, Yannicke Chupin connects Nabokov’s observations on Proust’s prismatic style of characterization to Nabokov’s own conception of character developed in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Lolita. Nabokov’s focus on the ‘visual quality of Proust’s poetics and characterization’ is at the exclusion of the ‘strong linguistic identity and the voices of Proust’s characters,’ amounting to a ‘partial analysis’ of Proust’s work that is guided largely by Nabokov’s own aesthetic proclivities (pp. 32–33). Luc Herman finds that Nabokov’s misogynistic judgments dominate his analysis of Austen; consequently, Nabokov often misreads Mansfield Park, mistakenly conflating author, narrator and protagonist. Ilse Logie argues that Nabokov’s moralistic reading of Don Quixote results in a misreading of the novel’s cruelty. And yet, following Krabbenhoft, Logie concludes that this misreading evolves into a rewriting of Don Quixote — that is, Lolita. Vivian Liska suggests that the flaws in Nabokov’s Kafka’s lecture may otherwise be understood as evidence of the story’s enchanting effect upon him, as ‘symptoms of his own unsettling encounter with Kafka’s story’ (p. 62), while Flora Keersmaekers locates parallels between Nabokov’s ideas about good reading and Jean Rousset’s (‘they share a view on SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 770 the goal of reading: utter and complete identification with the consciousness of the author’ [p. 78]), and then compares their readings of Madame Bovary. In part two, Geert Lernout argues that Nabokov benefited from writing about Joyce’s Ulysses in a time before Joyce studies truly took off, and points out original insights Nabokov makes that professional Joyce scholars would later affirm. Arthur Langeveld considers the sources Nabokov used to compose Nikolai Gogol, arguing that Nabokov selected details from Veresaev’s biography to present a distorted portrait of a maladjusted Gogol´, and that the monograph operates less as an objective study and more as a vehicle through which Nabokov grandstands his own views. Ben Dhooge strives to locate the sources Nabokov used when composing his Chekhov lecture, identifying a study by William Gerhardi as the likely fount of many of Nabokov’s claims. In part three, Lara Delage-Toriel argues that Nabokov’s interest in Madame Bovary can be explained by a number beliefs he shared with Flaubert, ‘among which [was] a common endeavor to give precedence to the beauty of art over its moral implications’, and a ‘rejection of the social importance of fiction’ (pp. 172–73). Roy Groen demonstrates that Proustian aesthetics have not only played a role in Nabokov’s novels, but also guide his prescriptions for good reading. He analyses a passage in Proust that, he argues, gives rise to ‘the central element in the aesthetics underlying Nabokov’s approach to...

Introduction

Introduction Katherine Ebury (bio) and Michelle Witen (bio) The idea for this issue on Joyce and the Nonhuman began with a panel for the 2017 North American James Joyce Conference in Toronto on “Our Funnaminal World,” which later turned into the theme for the 2018 Zurich James Joyce Workshop (“Joycean Animals”). The topic came about as a result of our growing interest in animal studies and the nonhuman, specifically with reference to an increasingly technologically driven society. This theoretical context is one that intersects nicely with other theories—ecocriticism, Marxism, queer studies, gender studies, technology studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, the blue humanities, psychoanalysis, deconstruction—but it also transcends these frameworks, in that it is specifically relevant to twenty-first-century issues. The lens of the nonhuman provides new insights into otherwise well-trodden pastures such as Bloom’s cat, Garryowen, and cattle, in addition to bestiality, animality, and the beastly. As this volume shows, however, it also opens up the field to animals, objects, and concepts that have received less attention, for example, chimera, hybrids, monstrosities, cephalopods, plesiosaurs, embodiments, and bicycles. This special issue consolidates and builds on recent work in Joyce Studies, including Robert Brazeau’s and Derek Gladwin’s Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce; Alison Lacivita’s The Ecology of “Finnegans Wake”; Vike Martina Plock’s special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly on “Joyce and Physiology,” which featured animals prominently in essays by David Rando and Sam Slote; and a first wave of essays on “Joyce, Animals and the Nonhuman” in Katherine Ebury’s special issue of Humanities.1 Other milestone essays within Joyce Studies have included Maureen O’Connor’s chapter on Joyce’s signifying animals;2 Plock’s essay on both human and nonhuman bodies in Ulysses;3 Robert Haas’s essay in ANQ;4 Cathryn Setz’s chapter on Shem the Penman in her recent monograph;5 and Margot Norris’s and Cliff Mak’s essays on animal figures in Finnegans Wake.6 Our special issue has also been initiated as an addition to recent developments in literary theory, such as Richard Grusin’s The Nonhuman Turn (2015), and the new interpretations of the works of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, and N. Katherine Hayles (to name a few) . [End Page 11] Grusin’s collection The Nonhuman Turn, in particular—inspired by the proceedings of his innovative 2012 conference of the same name, which included influential contributions from senior theoretical scholars from a range of fields, such as Bennett, Timothy Morton, and Steven Shaviro—has offered a crucial step forward for the Joyce scholars included in this special issue. According to Grusin’s introduction, in a project designed to be “politically liberatory,” the method aims to “extend our academic and critical concern to include nonhuman animals and the nonhuman environment, which had previously been excluded or ignored from critical or scholarly humanistic concern.”7 The nonhuman turn differs from an earlier generation of posthuman scholarship, Grusin indicates, in that while the posthuman “oscillate[s] between seeing the posthuman as a new stage in human development from human to something after the human and seeing it as calling attention to the inseparability of human and nonhuman,” the nonhuman turn focuses entirely on the latter approach in which the two are intertwined (ix). While this focus on the nonhuman is undeniably a twenty-first-century development, some of the central reference points for scholars across Grusin’s volume are key modern-ist thinkers such as Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead (viii), with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and especially the “Shem the Penman” section, being a core orientation for the final essay by Jane Bennett.8 For Bennett, Joyce’s work (as well as Walt Whitman’s) is a case study of how “texts are bodies that can light up, by rendering human perception more acute, those bodies whose favoured vehicle of affectivity is less wordy: plants, animals, blades of grass, household objects, trash” (234–35). By examining Joyce alongside the “nonhuman turn,” we find that Bennett’s intervention shows that, rather than simply applying a new critical methodology to his work, the conditions are right to acknowledge Joyce’s...

Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel by Bridget English

Reviewed by: Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel by Bridget English Julieann Veronica Ulin (bio) LAYING OUT THE BONES: DEATH AND DYING IN THE MODERN IRISH NOVEL, by Bridget English. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. x + 236 pp. $60.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Bridget English’s Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel departs from the postmortem hauntings that populate Irish literature and criticism, the “voices of the dead . . . missing people, unwritten histories, [and] unrealized potential,” to focus on the literary representation of the process of dying itself and the rituals surrounding it in an increasingly secular Ireland (27). English moves beyond Peter Brooks’s interpretation of deathbed scenes in literature as offering “a key moment of summing-up and transmission,” a way of understanding “man’s time-bound-edness, his consciousness of existence within the limits of mortality,”1 to consider Irish literary representations of death particularly “shaped by a cultural and literary experience that includes Roman Catholicism, the Famine years, and the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and martyrdom that characterized its struggle for independence” (4). Laying Out the Bones opens with English’s analysis of Nuala O’Faolain’s unsparing 2008 interview about her impending death from cancer without the consolation of religion, the endpoint of a trajectory English traces from 1922 to 2007 through James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room, Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, John McGahern’s The Barracks, and Anne Enright’s The Gathering.2 This eighty-five-year period sees the shift from communal practices around death enacted at home to the removal of the sight and site of dying from the domestic space. Given the tremendous social and religious changes that shape death and burial practices in the forty-four years that separate the two final novels in her analysis, one would welcome additional chapters focused on the works in this gap. Laying Out the Bones contributes a timely literary study to the growing body of interdisciplinary work that considers the Irish reputation for “doing death well”3 even as the Irish public and government continue to excavate a past in which so many were denied what English calls “a good death” (3). As the first of English’s selected novels, Ulysses serves as a contrast to the texts that follow; as in the other novels, death “disturb[s] the narrative order” and “disrupts fixed meanings and destabilizes narrative authority” (18). Joyce incorporates the dead throughout the novel to create “imaginative possibilities that are shut down by normative novelistic endings, ensuring that death functions as a point of reinvention or rebirth” (18). Joyce scholars have long considered the central place that death occupies in Ulysses and so will find surprising English’s opening claim in her chapter that “the central importance of death to Joyce’s Ulysses . . . tends to be overlooked by readers and critics who focus instead on the famous ending, with Molly Bloom’s [End Page 481] vitalist affirmation of life summed up in the word ‘Yes’” (23). The chapter would have benefited from a more sustained engagement with criticism focused on the representations of death and funeral practices and their implications for the depiction of ritual as well as language, form, and reinvention in the novel. English demonstrates how Joyce’s resurrection of past characters, his insistence on the textual presence of the physical, decaying, grotesque body, his protean language resisting closure, and his use of death and the afterlife serve to reinvigorate the narrative structure by “bringing the living and the dead into dialogue and submerging his readers in the infinite play of language that mediates between the actualities of lived experience and the meanings endowed upon that experience by death” (23). In astute close readings of “Telemachus” and “Hades,” English argues that Joyce’s design in Ulysses textually resists the meaninglessness implied in Buck Mulligan’s dismissal of the dead as “tripes” (U 1.206) and Bloom’s preference for Paddy Dignam’s corpse with its open orifices sealed up and sanitized to disguise death in an imitation of life (36, 43). In English’s framework, Joyce’s insistence on...

Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness by Dale Barleben

Reviewed by: Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness by Dale Barleben Jonathan Goldman (bio) STAGING THE TRIALS OF MODERNISM: TESTIMONY AND THE BRITISH MODERN LITERARY CONSCIOUSNESS, by Dale Barleben. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. viii + 176 pp. $70.00 cloth, ebook. Legal matters have long inflected Joyce scholarship, as befits criticism of a subject whose career involved litigations large and small, and who in life and literature repeatedly flagged crime and plotted punishment. The Joyce/legal studies cross-pollination has borne recent fruit, as shown by two 2017 volumes: Joyce in Court by the late Justice Adrian Hardiman and the essay collection Joyce and the Law edited by Jonathan Goldman.1 That it is part of a wider revitalization of literature and law studies is testified to by twenty-first-century works that include Joyce in re-assessments of literary modernism via legal discourse, including the writings of Sean Latham, Celia Marshik, Ravit Reichman, Paul K. Saint-Amour, and Robert Spoo.2 Dale Barleben’s new book, Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness, should have been a tremendous contribution to this burgeoning bibliography. Academically credentialed as an expert in legal studies and literature, Barleben seeks to link the two fields by “propound[ing] a limited theory of the poetics of law and literature that brings together British modern thinking and . . . cultural and critical legal studies” (7). Buttressed by a detailed framework of cultural theory of law, the book offers a confident argument: Modernist writers’ preoccupation with interior mental states [is] . . . analogous to the development of jurisprudence not just at the same time, but decades later. Reading the trials of the British moderns traces the evolution of legal thought and uncovers the ways the moderns helped influence how we understand interior mental states. (4) That is, Barleben’s project is to read modernist British (or British-ish) writers’ encounters with the law and attention to trials as shaping legal discourse, with particular interest in the developing ideas of mens rea—the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing—and actus reus—illegal actions–that suggest the legal subject’s culpability. He uses these readings to posit “[m]odernism’s styles . . . [as] closely connected to the discursive shift in thinking about the internal workings of the mind and identity politics” (21). Barleben astutely deploys the law as an aperture through which to view modernism’s mercurial narrative technique, perhaps its defining gimmick, and the link [End Page 457] between narration and modern interiority. Laudable intentions and compelling claims, these. Unfortunately, the argument’s credibility is crippled by an astonishing omission. Barleben includes chapters about Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Joyce. He thus seems almost completely to forget that modernist literature comprises women authors—as do, by implication, his peer-readers and his editor, named in the acknowledgments as Daniel Quinlan. Barleben dedicates several pages to a quick look at Radclyffe Hall; otherwise, his conclusions regarding British modernism, though generally phrased as some variation of “interpretation of the British moderns” (13) are drawn only from men and thus impossible to take as authoritative. Barleben makes frequent use of women critics, especially Shoshana Felman, Linda Hutcheon, and Judith Butler, but this does not remedy the omission of women modernist authors. Staging the Trials of Modernism starts with a reading of late-nineteenth-century British law as questioning the interior identity of the legal subject, specifically treating the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885 as a prelude to its most famous victim and Barleben’s first male modernist, Wilde. Chapters 2 and 3, the heart of the matter, present an implied teleological sequence of case studies, demonstrating that each male author’s experiences with the law guided his literary production. Of Wilde’s three trials, conviction, and imprisonment, Barleben writes, “The law’s invasion of . . . the interiority of the civil subject . . . shook Wilde’s belief in the justice system” (62). He reads the essay qua letter-from-camp De Profundis as a response to this violation, positing Wilde’s exploration and denial of testimony as a crucial text for modernist interior narratives.3 Segueing to Conrad, Barleben posits the nautical assessors...

Joyce Smithy: A Curated Review of James Joyce in Visual Art, Music, and Performance—Community and Elusive Understandings

Joyce Smithy:A Curated Review of James Joyce in Visual Art, Music, and Performance—Community and Elusive Understandings Tess Brewer (bio), Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (bio), and Derek Pyle (bio) The JJQ's initiative to list works of visual art, performance, and music that reference James Joyce is necessary at a time when artists often view their work as an analytical practice. The ambition is to feature Joyce-related art year by year.1 In order for a work to make a contribution to the interpretation of Joyce—and Joyce to art/music/performance history—it is important to ascertain a level of ambition in the work that at least gestures towards that with which Joyce pursued his practice. We hope to provide Joyce scholars and students with explanatory and interpretive notes on work that they would not normally encounter, and we welcome hints and submissions for consideration.2 Visual Art Considerations of Joyce's works in relationship to the visual domain and art's relationship to Joyce's literature are ever more present at Joyce symposia, which have become exhibition venues, and around significant dates and Joycean places. In the last installment of the "Smithy," I focused on the community-forging or collaborative creativity that reading Joyce appears to conjure. This time, I wish to highlight a dichotomy between more traditional illustrative responses and attempts to transcend these. Recently, on 4 May 2019, Finnegans Wake's eightieth birthday was celebrated, and Judith Wilkinson, an art writer and curator, took the lead in London by tweeting a best-of list of ten artworks (visual and otherwise) relating to Joyce and Finnegans Wake in particular (<@J_Wilkinson_Art>). Bloomsday makes one expect to see Joyce-related artwork in Dublin. The culinary theme chosen by the Joyce Centre this year, led the near-by Oliver Cornet Gallery (beside Belvedere College) to exhibit work under the title "Olives, Oysters & Oranges." A strange mixture ensued between interpreting the fruity theme erotically and a beautiful, dry, and utterly relevant series of head-sized "portraits" of one of Ulysses's characters: the humble spud, with [End Page 413] watercolors by Eoin Mac Lochlainn. Odd juxtapositions and mixtures are what Joyce seems to be about: the multi-stylistic nature of Ulysses and the multi-lingual makeup of the Wake. How conscious, however, should one be of such approaches? Krzysztof Bartnicki's various "translations" of Finnegans Wake continue—and this time he has transposed the first page of the book into hieroglyphics.3 He seems to say that it is, has, or should take a hybrid form, between word and image, possibly thinking of the sigla "hieroglyphics" that Joyce himself used for the conception of the Wake's characters. The difficult or undecipherable element is also discussed. Most artists approaching Joyce, however—or most who align their work clearly with the writer—seem to take a uni-dimensional approach. Carol Wade, one of the artists speaking at the 2019 Mexican Joyce Symposium "Joyce Without Borders," has created page-by-page illustrations of Finnegans Wake, which unearth Irish historical detail and hone in on figuratively rendered motifs, in order to "help Finnegans Wake be … read by a wide audience."4 Alfonso Zapico, a comic writer, has done a similar thing in James Joyce: Portrait of a Dubliner, highlighting period detail via the aesthetics of a contemporary children's book illustration.5 One would expect this more readily in a comic format than in what used to be called "fine art." In any case, what concerns me about Wade's work is that she finds a microscopic perspective a valid approach to how the thunderwords were printed and has enlarged these, as though William Anastasi's Bababad series of paintings—which had already done that in the 1980s—were unknown in either the Joyce or the art communities.6 There is to me a difference between not knowing about the earlier iterations and Wade's comment in her talk that she enjoys Finnegans Wake "like an Italian opera": Wade's or Zapico's nearly uniform style appears to me to mistake visual or figurative identifiability for broad accessibility, as though there was a "neutral" style involved—this is a concept that Joyce...

&lt;strong&gt;Ways into Joycean Silences:&lt;/strong&gt; Reviewing &lt;em&gt;James Joyce's Silences&lt;/em&gt;

The readings of silence and silences in Joyce's work advanced in the essay collection James Joyce's Silences (2018) demonstrate that the interpenetration of silence and speech in Joyce sustains important questions about the limits of language. The maintenance and imposition of silence in tension with articulated language effect complex interventions with respect to the cultural and political significance of discourse. The question of interpretation as a movement of translation soliciting the silent text into speech is central in the way Joyce scholars understand the resonance of silence as implicit communication.

Engaging Today's High School Students with "The Dead"

Joyce studies are typically relegated to university classrooms of graduate work because of their reputation for being too complex or esoteric for average readers. It is a reputation—sometimes deserved, but most often not—that has frustrated Joyce scholars for decades. As a high school English teacher in Florida, I noticed the immense potential of Joyce's works for a secondary classroom. Joyce's acclaimed short story, "The Dead," is the perfect introduction to the author and his many writings. Perspectives can range from Marxist to psychoanalytic; topics can run the gamut from sociology and politics to economics and religion; and literary elements can span from alliteration and symbolism to hyperbole and dichotomy. The Joyce unit I created for my 16-year-old students lasts a quarter of the school year, and while it culminates in a Ulysses Reading Group, having traversed through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, its genesis is in "The Dead." The best part is that the students love it. Through this essay—and my accompanying online hub for teaching Joyce, <TeachingJoyce.com>—I hope to inspire other secondary and post-secondary teachers to engage with Joyce's works in the classroom for they will add great value and enrichment to the educational experience.

"Every ephemeral anniversary": "Finnegans Wake at 80," Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, 11–13 April 2019

"Every ephemeral anniversary":"Finnegans Wake at 80," Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, 11–13 April 2019 Cleo Hanaway-Oakley (bio) It was with some trepidation that I traipsed up to Trinity College Dublin at 8.30 A.M. on Thursday, 11 April 2019. I was there to attend a three-day symposium in celebration of the eightieth anniversary of Finnegans Wake being published in full. Despite the early hour, the architecturally impressive Trinity Long Room Hub was already awash with excited Wake scholars. And herein lies the cause of my trepidation: I am not a Wake scholar. I fully identify as a Joycean; I have attended many Joyce events, acquired an impressive array of Joyce-themed t-shirts and accessories, spent over a decade reading and rereading Joyce's writing, and published a monograph on Joyce. But a Wakean I am not. I have participated in Wake reading groups and waded, alone, through the book's "collideorscape" of "mooxed metaphors," and I am starting to engage in the text more deeply as part of my new investigation into modernist literature and non-normative vision (FW 70.32, 143.28). In a field that still seems somewhat divided, however, I have been Team Ulysses rather than Team Wake. Happily, my trepidation was short-lived. It soon became apparent that the event, expertly organized by Sam Slote, was refreshingly inclusive. Attendees spanned generations; students mixed with professors; members of Team Ulysses were welcomed by members of Team Wake; and views from those outside of literary studies—and outside of the academy—were not only encouraged but actively promoted. Musical and artistic approaches to Finnegans Wake featured prominently, with Derek Pyle and Susie Lopez turning a Trinity teaching room into an interactive art space in which symposium attendees were invited to write a birthday card to the Wake and post it in a miniature coffin. The arts were also present in several of the papers; a variety of interdisciplinary angles teased out connections between Joyce's text and different art forms. Drawing on material from her forthcoming book, James Joyce and Photography, Georgina Binnie discussed possible sources for the "Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her coldblood kodak" (FW 171.31-32). Taking a musicological approach, Jonathan McCreedy argued for the influence of acoustic harmony theory on the Wake. Chrissie Van Mierlo put her art-history background to good use in her captivating keynote talk, in which she presented a variety of images, from portraits to cartoon sketches, as likely sources for the Wake's characters. As Pyle and Lopez recognized in the blurb that accompanied their art installation, reading the Wake is "inherently a creative process"; "[n]o [End Page 7] one can agree on its correct translation," and online versions of the text serve to multiply, rather than decode, the "endless sea of readings and meanings." Translation, and the multiplicity of meanings, emerged—rather unsurprisingly—as a key theme of the symposium. As someone who is woefully and embarrassingly monolingual, I am continually in awe of the glittering language skills that are showcased within the Wake and, also, of the impressive multilingualism being brought to bear upon the Wake by the book's worldwide readership and intrepid translators. It was a real privilege to hear about the varied approaches to translating Joyce's notoriously difficult text and to be treated to live readings from the different translations. We heard from Fuat Sevimay (Turkish); Enrico Terrinoni (Italian); Congrong Dai (Chinese); and Erik Bindervoet (Dutch). It was a fascinating discussion, covering questions of fidelity and accuracy; thoughts on whether translators should actively seek to open up or close down the multiplicity of the text; what one should do when one is faced with a word in the target language (such as the multiple Italian and/or part-Italian words already present in the Wake); the appropriateness, or inappropriateness, of reorienting certain words or passages so as to make them more relevant to the new cultural setting; and whether the text's Irishness should be played up or played down. I enjoyed hearing about Terrinoni's habit of sneaking the names of eminent Joyce scholars, including Fritz Senn, into his Italian translation, adding yet another layer...

Joyce, Dubliners and diaspora

Despite his self-imposed exile in continental Europe, James Joyce’s oeuvre is almost entirely set in Dublin. That paradox in itself reveals much about the psychological ramifications of diaspora in his life and writing. In their passing or more sustained encounters with migration, the characters of Dubliners are, like Joyce, subject to competing demands of personal, familial and national allegiance. The often subliminal presence of migration in their lives is especially manifest in their self-doubts, fantasies and obfuscations, as well as the conversations they have with themselves and others about it. In two stories in particular, “Eveline” and “A Little Cloud”, the focus is on characters who, while they both have aspirations to leave Ireland, decide to stay put. By addressing Dubliners through the lens of Avtar Brah’s concept of “diaspora space”, this article highlights the psychological complexities of migrant experience for those who choose to stay as well as leave. By demonstrating how such complexities are mediated through fiction, it contributes to a still under-researched aspect of Joyce scholarship, but equally, by putting diaspora space to the test of the narrative prerogatives and specificities of prose literature, it challenges and enriches our understanding of the concept and of diasporic Irishness more generally.

Joyce and The Law ed. by Jonathan Goldman

Reviewed by: Joyce and The Law ed. by Jonathan Goldman Thomas F. Cotter (bio) JOYCE AND THE LAW, edited by Jonathan Goldman. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. x + 294 pp. $84.95. Since it first emerged from within the legal academy some forty years ago, the law and literature movement has enriched the study of both literature and law in many ways: for example, by examining the many similarities (as well as differences) in the ways that readers and critics use and interpret literary and legal texts; by illuminating the literary presentation of legal themes, as well as the real-world legal backdrop against which fictional events take place; and by focusing attention on how the law affects the content and distribution of literary works themselves, most notably through issues relating to intellectual property, defamation, and obscenity. As an intellectual-property-law scholar with a lifelong interest in the works of James Joyce, I was therefore happy to see how a recent edited volume from the Florida James Joyce Series, Joyce and the Law, illustrates these currents coming together in Joyce's writing, ranging all the way from the little-read Exiles to Finnegans Wake. Authored by fifteen leading Joyce scholars, the essays making up the volume cast light on, among other things, Joyce's (occasional) use of legal subject matter as source material, inspiration, or theme; the manner in which the legal regimes governing early-twentieth-century Ireland would have shaped and constrained his characters' conduct and opportunities; and the way law, especially copyright and obscenity law, has affected the publication and use of Joyce's work over the years. Perhaps more importantly, though, the volume leads me to draw two other, less obvious connections or parallels between law and literature. The first relates to the ways in which both law (and other social norms) and literature (and other arts) are always engaged in a fundamental struggle to find the "right," if only temporary, accommodation between freedom and constraint. The second, perhaps not altogether distinct from the first, is how both literature and law can be understood as experiments or works-in-progress: simultaneously the product of human effort to engage with a specific time, place, and culture, as well as part of the raw materials by which that culture constantly revises itself, in a never-ending cycle of mutuality and response. In the following paragraphs, I will first briefly describe the individual essays, some in more detail than others, before sketching out their relation to these broader points. Following an introductory chapter by editor Jonathan Goldman introducing the collection, the individual contributions are arranged [End Page 213] into four parts: "Legal Lives of Joyce's Characters," "Legal Regimes of Joyce's Spaces and Places," "Joyce's Legal Languages and Sources," and "Circulation and Its Legalities." The first two of these analyze the ways in which various bodies of law either would have impacted the lives of Joyce's characters or, in fact, affected Joyce's selection and treatment of certain topics. Janine Utell's essay "Criminal Conversation: Marriage, Adultery, and the Law in Joyce's Work," for example, shows how early-twentieth-century Anglo-Irish regulation of sex and marriage would have shaped the circumstances confronting, and the (dis)satisfaction experienced by, characters including Exiles's Richard Rowan, several of the inhabitants of Dubliners, and (as they test the boundaries of their infidelities) both Leopold and Molly Bloom. Carey Mickalites's "Joyce and British Finance Law: Adrift on the Waters of International Investment" focuses on, among other things, how an understanding of England's ineffective regulation of securities fraud enriches a reading of "After the Race," while Steven Morrison's "Joyce, the Aliens Act, and Immigration" meditates on the way late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates on immigration and nationality would have informed the often bigoted sentiments expressed by characters throughout the works concerning Jews and Italians (whose actual numbers in Dublin circa 1904 nonetheless were quite small). Following this, in "National Languages and Neutral Idioms: Joyce Among the Language Laws," Tekla Mecsnóber discusses how debates over European linguistic policies in the aftermath of World War I, and efforts to advance the usage of artificial...

Successfully Navigating the Minefields and Pitfalls of Joyce Scholarship: Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book :

Successfully Navigating the Minefields and Pitfalls of Joyce Scholarship: Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book :

Is Modernism Really Transnational? &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, New Cosmopolitanism, and the Celtic Tiger

��� W riting in 2007, Richard Begam concluded that “in imagining a Hellas of the north, Joyce might well have envisioned a country not unlike the Irish Republic of today: liberal, prosperous, cosmopolitan, modern—a country that has achieved a distinct cultural identity, while assuming its rightful place within the community of nations” (203). By locating in Joyce’s vision the reconciliation of local particularity and global integration, Begam challenges a dominant tendency in Joyce scholarship and modernist studies that stretches from Ezra Pound to Hugh Kenner to Emer Nolan. Whether Wgured as parochialism versus modernism, nationalism versus internationalism, or nationalism versus metropolitanism, Joycean and modernist critics have traditionally held the local and the global in opposition. Begam’s challenge to this opposition illustrates a fundamental similarity between the recent cosmopolitan turn in Joyce studies and the transnational turn in modernist studies: rather than rely on mutually exclusive conceptions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, both approach their subject matter through a conception of cosmopolitanism that is consistent with and even constitutive of nationalism. Such arguments represent the inXuence of new cosmopolitan theory on literary studies, particularly James Clifford’s theory of “discrepant cosmopolitanism.” In his seminal essay “Traveling Cultures,” Clifford argues that the tendency to view the local and the global as mutually exclusive stems from an understanding of culture as rooted and static. In its place, Clifford offers “discrepant cosmopolitanism”—an alternative conception of culture as dynamic and mobile and of cultural identity as rooted in “speciWc, often violent, histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction” as well as “routed” in the displacement and transplantation that bring cultures into contact (1997a, 36). Like

James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future by Liam Lanigan

Reviewed by: James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future by Liam Lanigan Michael Rubenstein (bio) JAMES JOYCE, URBAN PLANNING, AND IRISH MODERNISM: DUBLINS OF THE FUTURE Liam Lanigan. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 243ix + pp. $90.00 cloth, $85.00 paper $69.99 eBook. There are a lot of references to the city in the writings of James Joyce. Liam Lanigan’s James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future goes deeper into the archive of Irish revivalist fiction and urban and town-planning than most literary studies of its kind, and by doing so it makes an original contribution to an otherwise well-established tradition: reading James Joyce’s modernism as inspired by the eccentric modernity of the city he always wrote about, Dublin. In this tradition of Joyce criticism, Dublin tends to become exemplary of urban modernity by way of its colonial exceptionality, and Joyce appears to be exceptional among his Irish contemporaries by way of his focus on urban Ireland as opposed to rural Ireland. Lanigan goes along with Dublin’s eccentric status as—to borrow a term from Joseph Valente—a “metro-colonial” city,1 but he argues against setting Joyce’s work too far apart from other Irish writing in the modernist period (23). Lanigan observes that, “rather than regarding Joyce as uniquely positioned to invent an Irish urban literary sensibility,” we should instead acknowledge that “Irish writing at this time [was] more generally engaged with the problem of the city” (39). Lanigan begins polemically: Joyce is not as exceptional as the “machinery of Joyce scholarship” would, by force of its own gargantuan momentum, seem to demonstrate (1). The paradox of this claim, made as it is in a book with “Joyce” in the title, and containing four of eight chapters dedicated to Joyce’s writing, is that in the end it contributes to the machinery of Joyce scholarship. And though Lanigan does reveal a mostly unnoticed continuity between Joyce’s writing about Dublin and Revivalist writers’ writing about Dublin, he nevertheless maintains Joyce’s exceptionality as the only Irish writer of the period successfully to imagine “what the Irish city might become,” as opposed to remaining mired in “the limitations of the present” (101). But the value of Lanigan’s book lies less with its general claim than with the archive it assembles and the readings it offers. Chapters 2 and 3 offer the reader a fascinating assortment of other less-well-known texts about Dublin, many of which may have been influences on Joyce’s characterization of the city as “a center of paralysis” (1).2 His [End Page 157] second chapter reads George Moore’s 1886 novel A Drama in Muslin as a scorching indictment of Dublin’s failures as a city, attributing them to a generalized “failure of the imagination” (52).3 According to Lanigan, however, Moore’s novel ends at a brutal impasse: “City and people decay together, and that is all” (63). Several of Moore’s stories are treated in chapter 3, alongside James Stephens’s 1912 The Charwoman’s Daughter and Seumas O’Sullivan’s 1917 Mud and Purple: Pages from the Diary of a Dublin Man.4 Lanigan’s readings are nuanced and detailed; the texts he presents are all revelations in themselves, as well as being tremendously useful to Joyce scholars who might otherwise remain unfamiliar with some of them. But the verdict Lanigan delivers on them is, nevertheless, quite damning: they all falter “at the moment of imaginative necessity” (94). Enter Joyce. In chapter 4, Lanigan shows how Dubliners continues in this tradition of Irish writing about Dublin: decrying the paralysis and lack of imagination there, but failing—at least until the final story, “The Dead”—to imagine its way out of the impasse.5 For Lanigan, it is not until we meet Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that we find a protagonist who “is not alienated from the workings of the city” and who therefore presages Joyce’s attempt to “render the reality of city life” a few years later in Ulysses (152). For Lanigan, it is the “Wandering Rocks” episode...

James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination by Michael Patrick Gillespie

Reviewed by: James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination by Michael Patrick Gillespie Nels Pearson (bio) JAMES JOYCE AND THE EXILIC IMAGINATION, by Michael Patrick Gillespie. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. xii + 179 pp. $74.95. The subject of James Joyce's exile, or his largely self-willed extraction from an Ireland he famously characterized as parochial and insular, has been a staple of Joyce criticism at least since Richard Ellmann's influential biography of the author in 1959. Traditional notions of Joyce's exile tend to reaffirm an essentially linear narrative, one that sees Joyce's art, and especially his aesthetic innovations, as dependent on an increasingly critical distance from the quotidian mentalité of his homeland. Against this formulation, Gillespie's new study argues that exile—both in general and as Joyce acutely experienced [End Page 452] it—is instead characterized by a cyclical vacillation between "nostalgia and rancor" or a constant shuttling between "feelings of esteem and ridicule for the country that has been left behind" (8). Gillespie uses attentive close readings to show how these simultaneous feelings of longing and censure become "embedded" in Joyce's writing (7), suffusing his characterizations of Irish life from the first stories of Dubliners onward. Although the book begins with a chapter that examines some of the broader issues surrounding exile, such as the important distinctions between forced and elective exile, the different experiences of economic emigration and diaspora, and the long traditions of exile and diaspora in Irish history and literature, Gillespie's main objective is to show that Joyce's personal sense of himself as an exile was central to his "creative process," and that it resulted in a stylistic "equilibrium where rancor and nostalgia exist hypostatically in a both/and interpretative environment" (24, 38). This well-argued point—that almost everywhere in Joyce's work we find these contrasting sentiments embedded in the prose in equal measure and that it is therefore reductive to impose any interpretive model that prioritizes one over the other—is a significant contribution to Joyce scholarship. In Chapter 2, "Dubliners: The First Glimpse of Ireland from Abroad," Gillespie demonstrates that components of the stories usually attributed to Joyce's critique of Irish provincialism—such as Little Chandler's Celtic Twilight aspirations and his inability to contend with Ignatius Gallaher's cosmopolitanism (in "A Little Cloud"), or the sentimental poem on Charles Stewart Parnell that Joe Hynes recites in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"—are actually comprised of equal parts rejection and defense. Gallaher's internationalism is as much hedonistic and empty as it is a desirable contrast to Chandler's confinement, while Hynes's verse, albeit an example of the paralysis of patriotic sentiment, is also quoted at such length that it evokes genuine feeling, not to mention that it suggests Joyce's own early poetic defense of Parnell (the lost poem "Et tu Healy"). "The poem goes on for [eleven] stanzas," observes Gillespie, "taking the reader beyond satire to actual consideration of the work" (54). Something similar could be said of the Michael William Balfe aria sung by Maria in "Clay" or the harpist's rendition of "Silent, O Moyle" in "Two Gallants" (D 106, 54). The chapter concludes by arguing that Gabriel Conroy's belated nostalgia for Irish belonging—his famous desire for a "journey westward" (D 223)—is not just there to "counterbalance … the criticism for Ireland" dished out in the prior stories; rather, it is the final and most prominent example of Joyce's exilic tendency, throughout the collection, to infuse scenes with "bifurcated feelings" about national attachment (56, 59). [End Page 453] In his analysis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Gillespie elaborates on this exilic double consciousness, not only with regard to Stephen's thoughts and impressions but also with regard to the structure and tone of the narrative itself. His thorough close readings reveal how Joyce's "attitudes, fluctuating between sentimentality and bitterness, are subtly manifested even in accounts of the most quotidian moments of Stephen Dedalus's childhood" (69). Importantly, these "contrary impulses" (62) call for "an interpretive methodology that accommodates rather than resolves ambiguity," and they also challenge "the...

Pragmatist and Prophet: A Review of Ronald Kuipers’s Richard Rorty

James Joyce once quipped that he wrote Ulysses to keep the critics busy for three hundred years. Given that work's length and notorious complexity, we can safely predict that Joyce scholars will not be short of work for at least a few generations to come. Some philosophers have also managed to secure a long afterlife for themselves, similarly employing the Joycean strategies of sheer volume and difficulty (think of Heidegger and Denida) to create an ongoing cottage industry of exegetes, interpreters, and under-laborers required as basic guides through their primary texts.If Richard Roity's work continues to survive and flourish in the arena of professional philosophy, it will not be for these reasons. His writing is clear and elegant, utterly shorn of fussy, jargon, and any motivated graduate student could easily work through his published books and major articles in a good summer. No: Roity's contributions will live on because, in sum, he articulates what has mattered in and cultural politics in the last century like no other humanistic intellectual, all the while helping us to think about who we are and what we might do with our lives in a strikingly original fashion. Given the accessibility of his work, accordingly, the best introduction to Rorty is Rorty himself. But the second best introduction would be to read Ronald Kuiper's new book, published in Bloomsbury's Contemporary American Thinkers series.In any slim, introductory account of a serious thinker's work, questions of what to include or exclude are always particularly urgent. In this case, Kuiper's decision to say more about fewer topics, rather than offer a superficial gloss of many, is a wise one. Rorty was simply involved in too many conversations with too many interlocutors to cover them all responsibly, so despite how fascinating Roity's exchanges with other contemporary thinkers were (from Norris to Habermas, Taylor to Putnam), coverage of these debates was quite rightly left on the cutting-room floor.This is not to say, however, that Kuipers does not situate Rorty within the traditions of American pragmatism and analytic philosophy. On the contrary, the task of clarifying Roity's philosophical relationships with Dewey, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson is, in many respects, the central task and the greatest accomplishment of this volume. To pull thus off, Kuipers approaches Rorty's work both chronologically and thematically. This blend of tactics allows him to provide cusp, yet surprisingly detailed overviews of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity in chapters 2 and 3 respectively, before considering Roity's philosophy of religion (chapter 4), and his ongoing reflections on truth, coming in the wake of Bjorn Ramberg's Davidsonian criticisms of his earlier, dismissive position (chapter 5). Kuipers begins, however, with an attempt to grasp Roity's philosophical labor through the lens of lus biography.While Rorty's autobiographical essay, Trotsky and the Wild Orchids, furnishes an important, first-hand account of lus early interests, and functions as a helpful back story to his mature philosophical positions, much of Kuiper's opening chapter is a gloss of Neil Gross's sociological case study of how Roity's intellectual shaped lus formation as a professional philosopher. The crystallization of his self-concept helps to explain Roity's turn away from tecluucal, analytical after the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature toward his later free ranging pragmatism and Ins ongoing interventions within cultural politics, broadly understood. But as Kuipers argues, following Gross, Roity's shift is neither as dramatic nor as unexpected as it might superficially appeal', given what we know of his adolescent world-view and the decisive influence exerted upon lus young mind by lus leftist parents, who exposed young Bucky (their pet-name for Richard) to the turbulent world of New York intellectuals and radicals in the 1940s. …