Joyce's Work Research Articles

“Funferall in Finntown”: A Report from the First Meeting of the New York-Philadelphia Finnegans Wake Reading Group, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 22 March 2009

a great success. While the early Dublin cinema-goers quickly lost interest in the Volta Cinematograph, Joyceans around the world are as fascinated as ever. In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce describes a recurring vision: see a cinematograph and and it brings back to my memory things that I had forgotten (LettersI 216). If the Trieste event is anything to go by, it looks as if the study of Joyce and cinema will also be going and on into the future of Joyce scholarship, resurrecting almost forgotten cinematic allusions and connections in Joyce's work.

Moduli stacks and invariants of semistable objects on K3 surfaces

For a K3 surface X and its bounded derived category of coherent sheaves D ( X ) , we have the notion of stability conditions on D ( X ) in the sense of T. Bridgeland. In this paper, we show that the moduli stack of semistable objects in D ( X ) with a fixed numerical class and a phase is represented by an Artin stack of finite type over C . Then following D. Joyce's work, we introduce the invariants counting semistable objects in D ( X ) , and show that the invariants are independent of a choice of a stability condition.

Hesitancy in Joyce's and Beckett's Manuscripts

centuries of using tools like the grid to create an illusion of reality, modernist artists started drawing attention to the painting's underlying grid to emphasize the discontinuity between reality and its presentation. Rosalind Krauss therefore regards the structure of the grid as emblematic of the modernist ambition (9). With reference to literature, Joyce's Finnegans Wake exemplifies the metafictional ways in which a text can draw attention to the underlying grid instead of hiding the traces of the writing process. Toward the end of the book, the text mentions the process of decomposition and subsequent recombination that characterizes the work (FW 614.35). To some extent Samuel Beckett has reversed this process in that his main focus is on the element of decomposition. Nonetheless, his writing method is not the complete opposite of Joyce's. Beckett also radicalized elements that were already present in Joyce's Work in Progress to draw attention to the underlying grid and thematize the creative act in an even more explicitly metafictional way than Joyce had done. To investigate this process, the notion of hesitancy in Joyce's and Beckett's works and manuscripts will serve as a focal point. During the writing of Finnegans Wake, Joyce decomposed excerpts from hundreds of source texts in the form of paratactic jottings in the Finnegans Wake notebooks; he subsequently recombined them in the drafts. Especially in the 1930s this process sometimes tended to become remarkably mechanical. For instance, when Joyce asked Mme. Raphael to make a transcription of the undeleted, that is, unused, entries from his notebooks into new ones (the so-called C-notebooks), she copied the original documents in random order. When she was copying entries from notebook VI.B.28 into notebook VI.C.09 and arrived at the last line of the last page, she just took a new notebook (VI.C.10) and continued with the next undeleted entry (green scarlet) from notebook VI.B.28. After VI.B.28 she copied VI.B.26, and then VI.B.23. When Joyce needed an extra paragraph to add to the July 1935 installment in transition 23, he took a notebook,

'Stone Hopes': Statues and the Politics of Longing in Joyce's Work

'Stone Hopes':Statues and the Politics of Longing in Joyce's Work Anne Fogarty (bio) Ekphrasis, the verbal account of a visual image, is a rhetorical convention much deployed by modernist authors.1 Ekphrastic description paradoxically permits an interfusion of the arts and becomes a means for written texts to acquire but also probe the aura surrounding the supposedly silent and superior visual media. This essay considers how Joyce deploys the ambiguous processes of commentary and metacritique linked with this Classical rhetorical device in the numerous allusions to public monuments and spaces that punctuate his work. References to well-known Dublin landmarks, including Nelson's Pillar, the Wellington Monument, and the statue of Daniel O'Connell, to name but a few, routinely figure in Joyce's texts. They help to create a sense of the precise geography of the city and also act as a means of unfolding the symbolic resonances and occluded historical contexts of its streetscapes. As with so many other aspects of the materialities that Joyce's writings evince, the allusions to Dublin's statues and monuments create a sense of the chaotic density of lived experience while also dissecting and reflecting on the ideological determinants and psychic substrata underlying everyday existence. The statues of Dublin in Joyce's oeuvre seem to be both casually observed, inert objects and also redolent and evocative symbols that act as coordinates for buried but vital cultural and historical memories. In examining how the references to statues are deployed in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, this essay proposes to probe how these scattered moments permit an analysis of how art and life intersects and how the political implicitly underwrites even the most disregarded facets of the topography of a colonial city. Additionally, Joyce wrests the symbolism of statues from the public domain and uses them as indices of personal import. Statues, as they are reflected on in his texts, demonstrate the intersection of the private and the political; they are used not just to intimate and canvas collective memories but also to map out the infinitely complex individual psychodramas of his characters. [End Page 69] Tracing the images of statues in Joyce's fiction is moreover a tantalizing and elusive process because it forcibly reminds us of the many different temporal dimensions that are conflated in his work. Ulysses, for example, depicts Dublin simultaneously as a seedy and down-at-heel imperial backwater, a vibrant and burgeoning domain struggling with the legacy and forlorn promise of post-Parnellite politics and with the dynamic energies of modernity, a place of desolation and poverty, and a space of utopian possibility. Furthermore, Joyce's writing still reconfigures the present cityscape as we encounter it today. It helps us to see the monuments of Dublin with altered perception and restores to visibility the statues that have been rendered even more mute by the passage of time and the ceaseless traffic, hectic pace, cluttered lines of vision, distracted attention spans, and crowded conditions of the twenty-first-century metropolis. Additionally, of course, his texts provide us with an historical lens and enable us to view monuments that have since been lost, destroyed, or displaced. Because of their potent evocation in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, the ghosts of former statutes continue to haunt the streets of Dublin. Despite its displacement by the current Spire, Nelson's Pillar in absentia remains as much part of the current fabric of O'Connell street as when it was actually in position there, due to its Joycean fictional afterlife. Joyce seems to have been fascinated by the ambivalences accruing around the monuments of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin as through tortuous processes of negotiation the outward insignia of nationalism began to dislodge long-standing images of imperial conquest. As will become apparent, statues for Joyce act as signs of numerous opposing forces: they are at once emblems of an embalmed past and a constricted present, mortuary indices of mourning and melancholia, symbols of the comic vigour and anarchic potentialities of Irish society, surreal, phantom presences, and points of convergence for unresolved historical conflicts...

Working with History, Working with Taboo:A Comparative Review of Two Works of Joyce Criticism

Gibson and Platt's Joyce, Ireland, Britain and Jen Shelton's Joyce and the Narrative Structure of Incest present two very different ways of understanding the discourses of history and power in Joyce. Shelton's study addresses the way in which Joyce's texts negotiate the problem of their own authority, stressing the complex strategies (literary as well as political) involved in Joyce's authorship of female narratives. Within this framework incest is used as a byword for the complex power-dynamic in which competing discourses are thrust in Joyce's work. Joyce, Ireland, Britain approaches Joyce as a writer whose texts are saturated with references to historically and culturally specific data. The essays collected in the volume insist on the need to read the Joyce canon not as a testing ground for abstract notions but as a body of work whose meanings and images are indissociable from the historical and geographical contingencies in which they are produced.

The Archivist, the Archaeologist, and the Amateur:Reading Joyce at the Rosenbach

The reading of James Joyce's work has been characterized since the early days of the industry by a tension between the specialist and the amateur. This article explores the ways we might consider amateur reading practices in the light of recent theories about genetic criticism and the interconnections between archaeology and literature. Using the Phil Phillips Collection in the Rosenbach Museum & Library as an archaeological site for the moment before Joyce studies moved away from the amateur and into the highly specialized strata of the professional, this article considers how the authority surrounding the archive may be destabilized.

Beyond Borders: I.A.S.I.L. Essays on Modern Irish Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Borders: I.A.S.I.L. Essays on Modern Irish Writing Walter Corbella (bio) Beyond Borders: I.A.S.I.L. Essays On Modern Irish Writing, edited by Neil Sammells . Bath: Sulis Press, 2004. 281 pp. $44.95. As historians and critics have frequently noted, Ireland is a deeply divided nation. Geographical, political, religious, and social boundaries have defined the Irish ethos and left an indelible mark in the work of Irish authors. This sense of division has determined, in multiple ways, the fragmentation that recurs as thematic component and stylistic device in their fiction. Beyond Borders recaptures these notions of boundaries, borders, and limits, as well as the associated concepts of transgression, crossing, and disruption as the organizing principles for the sixteen essays that form this collection. In "The Victorian Celt Stereotyped, Historicized and Imagined," Simon Trezise offers a historical and literary perspective on the phenomenon of stereotype formation. Focusing on nineteenth-century views of the Celts, particularly those of John Beddoe and Sophie Bryant, Trezise analyzes the interrelations between scientific bias and stereotypes.1 In opposition to the pseudoscientific notions of the Celt, he exposes the historical factors which led to the emergence of the Irish Celt as necessary racial and religious Other, stressing the attempts to combat those stereotypical views during the Irish Literary [End Page 398] Renaissance. In J. M. Synge's work, Trezise finds a more genuine, yet unsentimentalized, view of the Irish that arises from actual observation of, and interaction with, the people.2 This piece prepares the ground for the two subsequent essays, both of which foreground the relation between Padraic Pearse and W. B. Yeats. "Yeats and Pearse in Dialogue," by Robert Tracy, reads the Proclamation of the Irish Republic as political document, literary work, and response to Yeats's play Cathleen ni Houlihan.3 According to Tracy, through his use of imagery and his dramatic reading of the Proclamation, Pearse established a dialogue with Yeats that the latter would acknowledge and continue in his poem "Easter, 1916."4 Paul Murphy's "Yeats, Pearse and the Sublime Subaltern" lays emphasis on the ambiguity of Cathleen ni Houlihan. The play lends itself to two competing interpretations, both of which rely on the subordination of the archetypal "peasant" to national and class interests. By contrast, in Pearse's play The Singer, the idealized peasant assumes "oxymoronic status as the sublime subaltern" (48), which conceals his subordination.5 In Murphy's view, these plays exemplify the distinct approaches of "Anglo-Irish" and "Irish-Irish" ideologies in postcolonial contexts. It is hard to imagine that a conference on, or overview of, Irish literature would fail to include Yeats and James Joyce, and the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures' collection proves no exception. Ellen Carol Jones's "Joyce and Dividing Lines" and Louis Armand's "Joycean Hypertext: Technology and the Word in Finnegans Wake" approach Joyce's work from the perspective of postcolonial and postmodern theory respectively. Jones's somewhat obscure reading of the "Oxen of the Sun" episode in Ulysses explores the uses of language in the negotiation of identities through the production of "hybrid writing" in an "in-between space" (57). In such a space, the subaltern can engage in acts of translation, transgression, and transcription. In reference to the transgressive use of translation, Jones wonders, "How does cultural translation as a tropic movement transform the heliotropics of a dominant culture, the heliopolitics of imperialism?" (58). This type of "cultural translation," she argues, appears as pastiche in "Oxen of the Sun" and serves the purposes of interrogating and fragmenting the dominant cultural paradigms. At the same time, the creation of hybrid language and writing attests to the miscegenation resulting from imperialism. Having acknowledged Jacques Derrida's and Jean-Michel Rabaté's essays on Finnegans Wake, Armand characterizes Joyce's text as a language-producing machine.6 He claims, "The desiring machine, miming the totalizing movement of an exegesis, or exe-genesis, approaches a topological relation to itself similar to that of the Cantorean paradox of the set of all sets" (73-74). This statement illustrates the ways in which the complexities of Armand's prose complicate his interpretation of...

Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History Andrew Gibson Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History, by Cormac Ó Gráda. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. 300 pp. $35.00. Cormac Ó Gráda is a distinguished Irish economist and social historian whose past work has repeatedly, if intermittently, seemed relevant to the study of Joyce. As if conscious that Joyce scholars have recently started referring to him, in this absorbing account of Ireland's Jewish communities as they existed during Joyce's lifetime, he starts to edge closer to the Joyceans. His discourse will not be to everyone's taste: too much demographic analysis, too many tables and graphs. Nonetheless, the book is important. Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce not only substantially adds to extant accounts of twentieth-century Irish Jewry (Louis Hyman, Dermot Keogh)1 but corrects and, finally, definitively supersedes them. It is hard to imagine that a more scrupulously researched and accurate work on the subject will ever be possible. In one respect, at least, it gives us most, if not all, of the materials we need for assessing Joyce's representation of Irish Jews. Part of what Ó Gráda tells us may come as a surprise. Jewish Dublin hardly existed before 1866 and, in comparison with the Jewish communities in other British cities, was always proportionally small. Before the 1870s, most Irish people knew nothing about real Jews. The "blow-ins," however, who started arriving in the 1870s were Ireland's largest group of non-British immigrants since the Huguenots two centuries before them (10). They were mainly Litvaks (from Lithuania), who had good reasons for fleeing the Tsarist empire. In the 1880s, these included pogroms or the threat of them. Ó Gráda plays down the significance of the pogroms, however, arguing that the immigrants were as likely to be driven by economic motives and a taste for comparative ease. Their reception was, perhaps inevitably, somewhat mixed, but they by no means encountered a solid wall of Catholic prejudice. Take the question of usury, for example. Ó Gráda convincingly demonstrates that Jewish moneylenders in Ireland were always in a minority relative to Christian ones and were quite likely to be treated rather genially, not least because they were seen as a comparatively soft touch (63). In any case, the Church was relaxing its strictures against usury from the later nineteenth century onwards, and the diatribes against usury were more likely to come from figures like George Russell (70-71). This incidentally sheds an interesting light, not only on Mr. Deasy's expressed anti-Semitism but on Stephen's "A.E.I.O.U." (U 9.213). Ó Gráda is not an exegete. The title of his book notwithstanding, [End Page 151] he seldom comments on Joyce's work, and his view of Joyce's literary treatment of Jews is straightforward: Joyce knew little or nothing about Irish Jews and imported a character deriving largely from his creator's experience of Triestine Jewry into a Dublin milieu. In terms of the general outline of Bloom's character and many of the literal details of his history, not least his provenance, this is undoubtedly the case. The familiar argument is right. As Ó Gráda says, it was clearly only in Trieste that Joyce got to know Jews personally (204-05). But in terms of the meaning Bloom had for Joyce, his symbolic status or historical, cultural, and political value, the relation between him and historical Dublin Jewry is surely by no means negligible. So much is clear from the evidence with which Ó Gráda so industriously supplies us, not least by everywhere comparing Dublin's Jews of the period with its Catholics. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Ó Gráda's tale is that it reveals Dublin's Jews to have provided a historical figure for middle-class prudence and modest middle-class ambition at a time when much of the Catholic middle class was depressed and in decline. From the start, Jews largely established themselves in lower-middle and middle-class neighborhoods. They were never tenement-dwellers, and Jewish laborers were a marginal presence on the...

Risky Cruxes: A Report on the 2007 Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, 5-11 August 2007

Risky Cruxes:A Report on the 2007 Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, 5-11 August 2007 Amanda Sigler The crux was it was a bit risky to bring him home as eventualities might possibly ensue. U 16.1604-05 As Joyceans brought their cruxes home to Zurich, the ensuing eventualities inspired lively discussions of both the risks and possibilities attending realist approaches to Ulysses, generating conversational threads that stretched from minute considerations of individual words (such as "Sundam trench"—U 17.187) to larger questions about Joyce's fact-gathering practices and narrative technique (such as his urgent letters to relatives demanding information about Dublin that could be incorporated into his fiction). Spanning the week of 5 to 11 August, the 2007 Zurich James Joyce Foundation Workshop, ambitiously titled "Cruxes in Ulysses," focused on factual matters, the novel's relation to 1904 Dublin, and passages difficult to understand on a basic level. Unlike previous workshops based on series of presentations, this one was structured as an open-forum discussion, encouraging collective examination of precirculated passages and cruxes as well as ad hoc proposals to investigate additional problem areas. The forums were, however, interspersed with occasional mini-presentations that gave focus to the free-flowing exchange of ideas. Additionally, the discussions were framed most mornings by "DeCoda" sessions designed to attribute every line in the "Oxen of the Sun" coda to a specific character. These intensive scrutinies of Joyce's text were complemented by a walking tour of Joyce-related places in Zurich, a visit to the Kunsthaus, several dinners, a Finnegans Wake reading group open to the community, an evening of entertainment supplied by the poetry and alliterative novels of Amanda Ros, and a boat ride to Rapperswil on the Zurichsee. Individuals arriving at the Foundation, located on Augustinergasse between the picturesque Sihl and Limmat rivers, stepped immediately into a community of devoted readers and scholars who were immersed in a distinctively Joycean atmosphere. On a table in the middle of the discussion room, a selection of the Foundation's treasures and curiosities attracted eager hands. Among other artifacts and resources were stacked Thom's Directory, Aristotle's Masterpiece, yellowed newspapers from around 1900, and a deluxe multi-volume edition of Joyce's works that distorted the order of Ulysses episodes in order evenly to distribute the number of pages in each volume. A Jacob's biscuit tin rested high up on the old-fashioned oven, out of [End Page 17] reach of anyone tempted to throw it, and moustache cups, pots of Plumtree's potted meat (empty), coins, photos, and letters filled the display case, while in an adjacent room, t-shirts, bags, and mementos from previous Joyce conferences hung over books on tightly packed library shelves, which also managed to accommodate boxes of Pears and lemon soaps, Joyce-themed tins and bottles, and Humpty Dumpty figures perched precariously on the shelves' edges. In Fritz Senn's office, a cozy gathering place during breaks, visitors could view Joyce's death mask, suitcases, and walking sticks. (Later, participants were also treated to a view of the Foundation's open and closed drawers.) Throughout the Workshop, visitors were exhorted to sign the Foundation's prominently displayed guestbook, and by the end of the week the pages were filled not only with participants' names—Scarlett Baron, Harald Beck, Greg Downing, Anne Fogarty, Ruth Frehner, Hans Walter Gabler, John Gordon, Judith Harrington, Clive Hart, Geert Lernout, Robert Nicholson, Gerry O'Flaherty, Fritz Senn, Amanda Sigler, Sam Slote, John Smurthwaite, Masahiro Tsuji, David Vichnar, Aida Yared, and Ursula Zeller—but also with a few creative sketches, montage art, and a limerick commemorating the Workshop. On Sunday evening, the first arrivals met at the Foundation for a preliminary dinner of Fritz Senn's special potato salad, which (I am told) has become a classic dish on the Workshop's inaugural evening, a regular part of the preparatory activity that precedes a week of collective Joycean investigations. On Monday morning, as all participants crowded into the Foundation, eagerly searching for their multicolored nameplates in a room that guaranteed close seating and intimate conversation, a ringing glass bell called the first session into order. Joyceans from eight...

The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce Gulshan Taneja (bio) The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce, by Eric Bulson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xii + 139 pp. $19.99. Among Joyce scholars, "introducing" James Joyce has always been considered a necessity as well as an act of service to the master whose reputation as the creator of impenetrable narratives simply will not go away. Yet there are others, including common readers, younger scholars, and students, who are unfamiliar with Joyce and who should simply be encouraged to pick up a book and start reading. Eric Bulson must be sympathetic to the latter group, for he comes to his task with no apologies for the hermetic nature of Joyce's structures and makes no attempt to justify the difficulties of reading him. He responds to Joyce as one would to any major author who has a large body of writing that has stood the test of time, and his enthusiasm [End Page 163] for Joyce is evident. Unlike earlier introductions (by Michael Mason, Matthew Hodgart, and Steven Connor, for example1), Bulson's eschews a labored style, over-emphatic tone, and patronizing attitude, which makes for engaging reading. He sensibly defends Joyce against the charge of obscurity and refers to Samuel Beckett's discussion of Joyce's writing in his chapter on the author's early reception (110-11).2 But he contradicts himself when he maintains that "[f]or Joyce and so many other writers during this period, formal complexity and obscurity were considered literary virtues that ended up alienating readers" (19). While it is wrong to believe, as Bulson does, that Joyce pursued these as his chosen goals, it is true that a self-reflexive attention to design, form, and focused experimentalism is central to Joyce's work. Joyce himself appears to have valued the significance of his achievement in formal terms: "The value of the book is its new style," he told Arthur Laubenstein, an American organist with whom he was friendly in Paris, a year after Ulysses was published (JJII 557). In fact, the need for a new style was proclaimed by others, too, such as Virginia Woolf, who commented that life, or reality, could receive just treatment only in a medium that would have "something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose,"3 while Joyce himself said, "[O]ne great part of human existence cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead prose" (LettersIII 146). Woolf additionally wrote, "On all sides writers are attempting what they cannot achieve, forcing the form they use to contain a meaning which is strange to it" (3:429), and Joyce too sought new ways to make "the modern world possible for art," as T. S. Eliot put it in "Ulysses, Order, and Myth."4 Bulson maintains that "[t]he difficulty of so many modernist texts created a conspicuous divide between intellectuals and the masses (19)," yet he does not take his readers into his confidence and explain this remark but merely refers them to John Carey's book on the subject.5 Similarly, in his short chapter on "Joyce the Modernist," Bulson does not define modernism in clear enough terms to serve his larger purpose. In the process, he deprives his intended readers of a useful line of inquiry that could run parallel to individual explorations of the Joyce canon. Bulson divides his introduction to Joyce into three major segments—Joyce's life, the contexts within which he should be appreciated, and his works—and he begins with Joyce's early years in Dublin. He then goes on to recount the writer's life-long exile from Dublin in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. The descriptions of Joyce's early years in Dublin and the later years on the continent—marked by want, sickness, and the shadow of war—are vividly drawn with empathy and wit and make for fascinating reading. He exercises judicious control over [End Page 164] Joyce's biographical details and establishes their relevance to one's appreciation of his writings. Joyce's iconic reputation as a quintessential modernist writer and his work as journalist, translator...

Winds of Change: Bloomsday, Immigration, and "Aeolus" in Street Theater

Winds of Change:Bloomsday, Immigration, and "Aeolus" in Street Theater Matthew Spangler (bio) Those who attended the 2004 International James Joyce Symposium or who happened to be in Dublin for Bloomsday that year might have seen The Parable of the Plums, an hour-long street performance of the "Aeolus" episode of Ulysses, held in front of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street. Featuring eight-foot-tall puppets, live music, and Asian, West African, and Irish dancers, it was the largest Bloomsday observance ever with 170 performers and several thousand people in the audience. It was also a highly anticipated event in the five-month long ReJoyce Festival, occupying the prime-time slot of eight o'clock on the evening of 16 June. But many who saw the performance first-hand, particularly those who know Joyce's work well, left feeling perplexed. Sean Latham, for one, described it as "perhaps the most surreal experience of the week's festivities."1 After all, what do Asian and West African dancers have to do with Stephen's story of two plum-spitting women or Bloom's attempt to sell a newspaper advertisement?2 And what to make of the almost complete absence of spoken text in favor of music and dance? To say the least, The Parable of the Plums did not resemble what one might expect as a stage adaptation of "Aeolus." Nonetheless, it captured the spirit of Ulysses in a profoundly important way. Through a nonverbal parable of music and dance, it told the story of a changing Dublin in the midst of an economic transformation and populated by large numbers of migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers,3 a story as urgent today, perhaps more so, as it was in 2004. Scholars and artists have generally paid little attention to Bloomsday street performances, perhaps because many regard them as kitsch—at best, as a fun and innocuous way of celebrating Joyce's fiction, and, at worst, an incarnation of the staged Irishman supported by Fáilte Ireland and put on display for American tourists. But street theater, not having to operate under the spatial constraints of traditional theater, is often freer to be artistically innovative and rhetorically powerful. In arguing for the importance of The Parable of the Plums for both Joyce studies and Irish performance art more broadly, I will, first, describe a brief history of Bloomsday spectacles in Dublin and, [End Page 47] second, discuss the growing prevalence of Irish racism in the context of recent trends in economics and immigration. Establishing the primary contexts in which this performance occurred—the history of Bloomsday observances, on the one hand, and current debates regarding immigration and racism, on the other—is vital to making a case for its importance overall. Finally, I will return to a detailed description of the performance itself in light of these artistic and societal contexts. I. Bloomsday: Dublin's "Equivalent of the Mardi Gras"4 Senator David Norris, who in the last twenty years has become something of Bloomsday's public face, might overstate the case by equating Bloomsday with Mardi Gras, for, as anyone who has been to both will attest, the differences abound. But Bloomsday and Mardi Gras do have several things in common, probably the most significant of which is that both are large, public festivals featuring music, theater, and dance in the streets. In fact, performance has been a central component of Bloomsday since it was first celebrated in Dublin in 1954.5 In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the events of Ulysses, the first Dublin Bloomsday was organized by John Ryan, editor of the literary periodical Envoy, and Brian O'Nolan, better known today as Flann O'Brien, author of At Swim-Two-Birds,6 though better known in 1954 as Myles na gCopaleen, author of the Irish Times column "Cruiskeen Lawn." Ryan recruited six participants, each of whom performed specific characters from the novel: A. J. Leventhal, who was Jewish and the Registrar of Trinity College, played Leopold Bloom; Anthony Cronin, then a young poet, was Stephen Dedalus; Patrick Kavanagh, because he was also a poet, appeared as the novel's third-person narrator; O'Nolan...

The Resurrection of Being in the Ricorso of Finnegans Wake

The Resurrection of Being in the Ricorso of Finnegans Wake Damon Franke (bio) In dreaming, all their sunshine seemed so sad,As though the current of the dark To BeHad flowed, prophetic, through the happy hours. Amy Levy, "Xantippe: A Fragment" In 1917, Lord Ernest Rutherford split the atom and helped usher in the nuclear age. Twenty-two years later, in Finnegans Wake, James Joyce deliberately radicalized the problems of writing by dissecting and rejoining the roots of language and, in the process, added by chance an eventual contribution to physics in coining the neologism "quark" (FW 383.01). Joyce puns on this interdisciplinary parallel in the famous phrase often used to describe the revolutionary style of his last work: "The abnihilisation of the etym" (FW 353.22). The annihilation of the atom becomes, through etymology, a comment on the earliest formation of words out of nothing (in Latin, ab nihil-"from nothing"). Indeed, in discussing the creative style behind the Wake, Joyce suggested that he had composed it "out of nothing."1 If words, or etymons, appear without primordial order and lead to a deconstruction of the divine origin of language, these playful references nevertheless suggest that in the beginning of human speech was a word. Yet even the most cursory forays into the Wake agree that it assaults not only traditional conventions of narration but also the very idea of a founding logos. As if an encore to the virtuoso parody of styles that structures Ulysses, Finnegans Wake is a text in which the multiplicity of languages gobble each other up and churn out a concatenation of neologisms, nonsense, and nuanced profundities. To recoup a sense of the depth of style, narration, and effect of the Wake remains an unfinished scholarly task, one that may, among other uncoverings, point to an alternative grammar of Being. Joyce's use of Ur significations of "to be" in the last book of Finnegans Wake suggests that this verb itself is inflected in any logos. By tracing Joyce's repetitive, proximate insertions of the Indo European root for "to be," "*es-," I will show how this linguistic style corresponds to a philosophy that intrinsically links language and Being. Through Joyce's puns and relentless collocation of es morphemes, [End Page 115] the verbal high jinks of the ricorso use the smallest bits of language to elaborate an ontological concept. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, I argue here that Joyce similarly questions Being to perform a new grammar for beings.2 In effect, the ricorso is an etymological allegory that subversively comments on one of its central themes, resurrection, by implying that Being is a continuous present defined by close relationships among individuals. As Book III of the Wake winds down and dawn approaches, Johnny MacDougall, the last of the Four Old Men, now inscribed as a bedpost, proceeds to offer his perspective on the bedroom of HCE and ALP. The "[f]ourth position of solution" that he presents indicates some possible discord with the three synoptic positions-"How johnny!" (FW 590.22-23, 23). With the advent of Book IV or the ricorso, the work-long parallel between the Wake and the four Gospels begins to finish its cycle of commentary on the themes of death and resurrection. In an assortment of varying pagan, Christian, and linguistic forms, resurrection lies at the center of Book IV. Hugh Kenner states that Book IV "corresponds, in ways too obvious to require enumeration, to the Resurrection at the climax of the Lenten sequence, and to the Last Gospel (John I) at the close of the mass proper."3 On the other hand, James S. Atherton, in commenting on the numerous travesties Joyce makes of the liturgy, undercuts an orthodox interpretation of the Wake by reminding us of the "many quotations that would have to be ignored by anyone claiming to prove that Joyce was a devout Catholic treating the Mass with respect."4 When the Wake was written and when Kenner was drawing his parallels between the mass service and Joyce's last work, a priest recited the Last Gospel at the close of the liturgy as...

James Joyce and the act of reception: reading, Ireland, modernism

The following text is taken from the publisher's website: James Joyce and the Act of Reception is the first detailed account of Joyce's own engagement with the reception of his work. It shows how Joyce's writing, from the earliest fiction to Finnegans Wake, addresses the social conditions of reading (particularly in Ireland). Most notably, it echoes and transforms the responses of some of Joyce's actual readers, from family and friends to key figures such as Eglinton and Yeats. This study argues that the famous 'unreadable' quality of Joyce's writing is a crucial feature of its historical significance. Not only does Joyce engage with the cultural contexts in which he was read but, by inscribing versions of his own contemporary reception within his writing, he determines that his later readers read through the responses of earlier ones. In its focus on the local and contemporary act of reception, Joyce's work is seen to challenge critical accounts of both modernism and deconstruction.

Joyce and the narrative structure of incest

Incest as a theme is prominent in Modernist texts, from Freud's deployment of the Oedipus story to explain human psychological development to Joyce's use of father-daughter and brother-sister incest as one story-strand of Finnegans Wake. Shelton argues that readers should look beyond thematic incest in Modernist texts to its narrative structure, in which father's and daughter's stories call one another into being even as each attempts to forestall the other. Father's and daughter's stories tumble around one another, linked by shared story elements, each attempting to make the other unreadable, neither ever achieving ascendancy. Shelton argues that Joyce uses this structure as a fundamental building block of his texts, managing the competing energies of chaos and control whose struggle characterizes modernist experimental texts. Her approach allows both a way for readers to sidestep a simplistic choice (Is Joyce's work carnivalesque or does it privilege mastery?) and an incentive to attend to the voices of adolescent female characters who, less centrally situated in Joyce's texts than adults and males, contribute sassy, back-talk views of culture that highlight its acts of force against individuals. Focusing especially on the textual lives of girls and young women in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, Shelton proposes a fresh way to see and value contests over sexuality, power, and storytelling in Joyce's work.

"Phoenix Rising": A Report on the 2007 Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 8-14 July 2007

"Phoenix Rising":A Report on the 2007 Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 8-14 July 2007 Scarlett Baron Like a mythical phoenix rising from its ashes in flamboyant plumage, this year's Dublin James Joyce Summer School, emerging from the vestiges of its last cycle in 2005, was spectacular. The School, which was founded in 1988 by Augustine Martin, then Professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin, missed a couple of beats in 2004 and 2006 but now seems set to re-establish itself as a regular feature of the Joycean year. The School's renaissance was made possible by a felicitous conjunction of circumstances that saw University College Dublin, Boston College Ireland, the National Library of Ireland, and the James Joyce Centre pool their resources in support of the cause. This quadripartite alliance was crucial to the School's organization and was reflected in its numerous emblematic venues. Indeed, Joyce's Wakean quip, "Run, Phoenix, run!" (FW 283. n3), seemed an apt prophecy of the fiendish pace at which participants were ushered from one Joycean hotspot to another. The School's students, most of whom were staying in residential halls on the UCD campus, commuted into the city center at every "joyday dawn" (FW 194.11), jogging jauntily across or around Stephen's Green to Newman House, filling those hallowed halls in which Stephen, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, confronts the dean of studies about beauty and vision, funnels and tundishes, Aristotle and Aquinas. Joyce's stern-looking bust, which faces Newman House from the Green's south side, looked on impassively. Morning lectures were typically followed by a quick sprint across to Boston College, on the Green's east side, for lunches and afternoon seminars. The National Library of Ireland, a mere stone's throw away from the Green's northern edge, played host to the School's program of afternoon workshops, as well as to guided tours of the Library's highly acclaimed W. B. Yeats Exhibition and a splendid opening reception. The James Joyce Centre in North Great George's Street, although it did not take us "farther westward" and thus "box [our] corner" (D 223, 11), made for a fantastic banquet venue for the School's closing ceremony and provided a perfect launching pad for walking tours of Joyce's Dublin. Anne Fogarty, who has been the School's Academic Director since 1995 and who now holds the Chair of Joyce Studies at UCD (as well [End Page 425] as being President-elect of the International James Joyce Foundation), blazed a trail for the week's lecturers with a dazzlingly detailed textual and historical examination of Joyce's consistently oblique treatment of the Phoenix Park Murders in Ulysses. There was more talk of murder and of Joyce's fascination with epistemological uncertainty in Mr. Justice Hardiman's discussion of four cases of unnatural death in Joyce's works. Fritz Senn's talk on Joycean "coincidance[s] of their contraries" (FW 49.36) also had uncertainty—or what he termed a "black hole principle"—at its heart. Fritz (who is the Summer School's Patron) showed that no single interpretation of Joyce's works has ever been found to withstand sustained analysis. He seized on two textual nuggets to illustrate Joyce's self-consciousness regarding this "disruptive pattern principle." In "The Sisters," the narrator's aunt innocently asks, "How do you mean?" (D 10), and in "Telemachus" Haines evasively responds to a question of Stephen's with the oxy-moronic statement: "I don't know, I'm sure (U 1.493). Sean Latham contributed to the week's feast of Joycean uncertainties in a talk on the topic of modernities. Taking the discrepancy between the times indicated by Dublin's ballast office clock (set to Dunsink time) and time ball (set to Greenwich time) as a symbol of the critical parallax Joyce's works require of their readers, he questioned the adequacy of any straightforward description of Joyce as a modernist writer, presenting him instead as an author whose works negotiate an array of discontinuous and even discordant modernities. Interdisciplinary approaches were well represented. Katherine O'Callaghan brought her...

New Millennial Joyce

New Millennial Joyce Gregory Castle (bio) Ellen Carol Jones and Morris Beja, eds., Twenty-First Joyce. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2004. xii + 283pp. Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2004. xi + 266pp. Gian Balsamo, Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence, and the Messianic Self. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004. vii + 180pp. James Joyce's Ulysses is today regarded as one of highest literary accomplishments of the twentieth century. It is a judgment that even his detractors are now likely to accept. Early reviews of Ulysses, however, were deeply divided, some accusing Joyce of purveying in pornographic filth, others praising it for its innovative style and subject matter. By the 1950s and 1960s, academic critics, perhaps uncomfortable with Joyce's linguistic and narrative experiments, sought to find order and coherent meaning in works like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It was not until the 1980s, with the arrival of theory, that Joyce's work became the foundation of a far-reaching and influential industry. This is the narrative that Joseph Brooker relates in Joyce's Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture. It is the story of a subversive cultural figure who gradually moves from iconoclast to icon [End Page 163] . The process began with T. S. Eliot's 1923 review of Ulysses. Far from reacting with horror as had so many earlier reviewers, far from disparaging Ulysses as formless or obscene or anti-Catholic and anti-Irish, Eliot discerned in it a "mythic method," "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (177). At the same time, Ezra Pound, in an attempt to pressgang Joyce into the ranks of the "Men of 1914" (as Wyndham Lewis famously identified Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and himself [249]), praised his modernization, his Flaubertian severity of style and detachment from nationality. Eliot's desire to take comfort in Joyce's methodical use of Homer was shared by Pound, who once remarked that Joyce used the Odyssey as a form of scaffolding, "a means of construction, justified by the result, and justifiable by it only" (Pound 406). Despite Lewis's attempt to banish Joyce from the "developed modernist aesthetic" (48), Eliot and Pound prevailed in "denationalizing" Joyce and making him an exemplar of what would come to be known as "international modernism" (49). The "critical internationalization of Joyce" (55) continued in the journal transition, which, from 1927 to 1938, published installments of Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake). Eugene Jolas, editor of transition, insisted on cosmopolitanism in matters of aesthetics but privileged language over the abstract image celebrated by the Men of 1914. This language-centered aesthetic was reinforced by the essays collected in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929). In the most famous of these essays, Samuel Beckett argued that Joyce's language possessed "the savage economy of hieroglyphics," that his words "are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear" (57–8). The 1930s saw the first full-length studies of Joyce's Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert and Frank Budgen, who had been more or less conscripted by Joyce to promote his life and work. It is with Gilbert that we see the beginning of "a long-term trend toward completeness and totality in the understanding of Joyce, the belief that his work not only bears but demands exhaustive explication" (60–1). Gilbert also carried on the tradition of a classical reading of Ulysses, elaborating on the "mythic method" that so attracted Eliot and Pound. Budgen attempted a quite different form of domestication by situating Joyce within a tradition of the realist novel. Brooker's account of the early reception of Joyce's work provides not only a glimpse into the making of Joyce's reputation but also a compelling discussion of the formation of international modernism. The chapter that follows is a somewhat less compelling treatment of Joyce's academic reception. In England, F. R. Leavis's largely negative judgment of Joyce's work rested on his belief that it lay outside [End...

“Joyce in Austin”: A Report on the 2007 North American Joyce Conference, University of Texas at Austin, 13-17 June 2007

“Joyce in Austin”:A Report on the 2007 North American Joyce Conference, University of Texas at Austin, 13-17 June 2007 Catherine S. Kalish The English Department at the University of Texas at Austin had a laudable goal for the 2007 North American James Joyce Conference: to honor the lifetime achievement of Tom Staley. Organizers Alan Friedman and Charles Rossman put together a tremendous conference that included over 150 academic presentations, an exhibition of Joycean documents and artifacts, a staged reading of Tom Stoppard's Travesties, a boat ride that showcased a swarm of bats, special panels and plenary speakers, film screenings, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake reading groups, and, of course, the requisite Gospel Brunch at Stubb's [End Page 428] BBQ. I imagine that when Joyce wrote, "A glass of peel and pip for Mr Potter of Texas, please" (FW 274.35n3), he could not have had anything more spectacular in mind. The conference began as attendees gathered in the lobby of the Harry Ransom Center, enjoying a spread of hors d'oeuvres and wine just ten feet from one of five copies of the Gutenberg Bible. The HRC had a small but fascinating exhibit of Joyce materials. In addition to page proofs from Ulysses and corrected carbon typescript pages of Finnegans Wake, highlights included Lucia Joyce's notebook, entitled "My Dreams," and a typescript of her brief biography, "The Real Life of James Joyce." The exhibit displayed various works of art depicting Joyce and a subscription list for Ulysses that included names such as John Dos Passos, Alfred Knopf, and William Carlos Williams. In addition to textual artifacts, the collection showcased Joyce's calling card, wallpaper from 7 Eccles Street (a faded orange and green pattern), and Joyce's death mask. Notably, many of the items on display came from the private collection of Tom Staley. In addition to the exhibit, the Ransom Center boasts a broad collection of materials, including the complete and final first-edition page proofs of Ulysses and page proofs for Finnegans Wake. The Center also has correspondence from Joyce to his publishers, literary friends, and family. In addition to textual holdings, it has compiled many of Joyce's personal papers such as his receipts and memorandums. This wonderful resource is only enhanced by the kind and thoughtful staff of the Center. As usual, there were far too many concurrent panels; at times, there were nine or even ten running simultaneously. People ducking in and out are a distraction, but with so many intriguing presentations it became a necessary evil. There were many notable presentations. Susan Adams, who traveled all the way from Fiji, gave an illuminating paper about the history of Gollywoggs and made a strong connection between the three-part structure of the minstrel show and the structure of "The Dead." Jim LeBlanc, one of the organizers of the 2005 Ithaca conference, presented "Mrs. Kearney's Spite: Risking One's Life in 'A Mother,'" in which he argued for the complexity of Mrs. Kearney's role in the text. He used Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel and Jean-Paul Sartre in order to explain the societal forces at work that keep Mrs. Kearney from simply existing as a "pompom mom." Perhaps one of the most interesting papers, "Joyce Among the Jansenists," came from Richard Corballis and France Grenaudier-Klijn of Massey University in New Zealand and included a discussion of Marcelle Tinayre's novels and the numerous allusions to Tinayre's body of writing as it appears in Joyce's work. Tinayre was fascinated with the Jansenists, their role within Catholicism, and their [End Page 429] subsequent condemnation by the Church. The authors' examination of intertextuality was complemented by Finn Fordham's enjoyable paper. Fordham, who had initially planned to present work on methodology for the new Joyce biography, changed his discussion to focus on Joyce's use of multiplicity, which he referred to as "a fundamental modus operandi of Finnegans Wake." He continued by discussing the genetic layers of the Wake, explaining the way in which the process of writing affected the writing itself. After a long day, I was wary of attending the plenary featuring Sean Walsh; following the initial screening...

Geopolitics and the Sight of the Nation: Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September

Geopolitics and the Sight of the Nation: Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September

Joyce & the 17th International Symposium

Joyce & the 17th International Symposium Lauren Onkey Anne Fogarty and Timothy Martin, eds. Joyce on the Threshold. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. xi + 299 pp. $65.00 Joyce on the Threshold is a collection of essays from the Seventeenth International James Joyce Symposium held at the University of London in 2000. While the millenium was not the stated theme of the symposium, Timothy Martin, one of the book's editors, asserts in the introduction that the sense of living "in a liminal moment, of standing between eras, exercised a significant influence on the program." Martin and coeditor Anne Fogarty have brought together fourteen essays from the conference that address the themes of marginality and liminality in Joyce's work; these essays explore the thresholds between genres, styles, nations, sexualities, and languages. The essays are organized into four general topics: marginal figures and subjects in Joyce's work; Joyce's liminal identity as an Irish writer; Joyce's positioning at the threshold of modernism, both historically and stylistically; and a final section on material subjects typically considered marginal (copyright law, translation, and the rare book and manuscript market). The scholars chosen for the volume reflect the international focus of the conference. [End Page 124] Every essay is lucid and thoroughly researched, as is typical of work published in the Florida Joyce series. As the section topics indicate, the editors have chosen essays that define marginality very broadly; while this allows for a range of papers that probably represent the symposium well, it does occasionally make for a disjointed volume. The essays do not coalesce around a focused set of issues or questions. Essays on such diverse topics as copyright and Joyce's exploration of the Kabbalah, while equally impressive, have little to do with each other; taken together, they can stretch a term like "marginality" beyond meaning. Katharina Hagena's "Towers of Babble and of Silence," a provocative argument about the function of the tower in Ulysses, has little connection to the overall topic of marginality. The result is an important collection, but one that will be most useful for specific essays, rather than as a contribution to the study of marginality or liminality. It reads more like a journal issue than a coherent book, which is often true of collections drawn from conferences. The essays on marginal characters or subjects in Joyce's work offer the most provocative readings of Joyce's texts. Building on earlier work on Ulysses, Karen Lawrence explores how Joyce's use of the flaneur straddles modernity and nostalgia to produce a more ideologically flexible and unstable representation of the flanerie than most postcolonial scholars of the subject have previously argued. Mary Lowe-Evans's reading of Freddy Malins's "holy" function in exposing the ideological conventions that trap the other guests in "The Dead" is a particularly fine example of how a focus on "marginal" characters can recast a story. And Lowe-Evans's focus on a text other than Ulysses is welcome (half the essays in the volume focus primarily on Ulysses). The essays focusing on Joyce's Irish marginality are particularly strong. Drawing on David Lloyd's notion of adulteration, Andrew Gibson argues that Joyce uses "style as revenge" in the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter of Ulysses to critique the imperialist and nationalist politics of the English anthology. P. J. Mathews's analysis of the Dubliners stories that originally appeared in the Irish Homestead complicates the standard reading of Joyce's antagonistic relationship with the Irish Revival. Mathews reconstructs the relationships among the Irish Agricultural Organisation, the Gaelic League and the Irish Literary Theatre and argues that "the coalescing of these three movements … brought about a new, if loosely bound, consensus that worked to provide a radical alternative to old-style parliamentary politics." By exploring Joyce's connection with the cooperative movement, Mathews undoes the traditional [End Page 125] dichotomy posed between Joyce's radicalism and the revival's conservatism, revealing the common ground between Joyce, Horace Plunkett and John Millington Synge, as well as points where Joyce diverged from the movement, especially on issues of gender and sexuality. One of the most interesting and unusual essays in the collection is...

James Joyce and the Difference of Language by Laurent Milesi

MLR, 102.1, 2007 217 on to suggest that inhis literary maturity Dreiser was both aRomantic and aRealist, having had his beginnings in the age of Emerson and itsnineteenth-century essen tialist claims for an ordered universe, instead of the accidental, relativistic universe ofmany twentieth-century intellectuals. Dreiser spent only a year at what is now Indiana University before he moved toChicago in I887 to begin a series ofmanual jobs, including labourer, factoryworker, and driver. Loving argues here thatDreiser was the firstgreat American novelist to come from thewrong part of town. Itwas his first-hand familiaritywith the aspirations and the restraintsplaced upon ordinary Americans thatsuggested tohim the implacable determinism thatunderlay all human effort,and gave hiswriting itsunsophisticated yet extraordinary power. Loving uses his detailed account ofDreiser's writing fornewspapers to show his burgeoning social consciousness as his work took him across America, probing into the seedier side of American life in cities such as St Louis, New York City, and Pittsburgh. When Dreiser moved from newspapers tomagazine writing and edit ing,Loving trackshis restlessmove from one journal to another to demonstrate his subject's determination to chronicle American life inmore 'realistic' detail than had previously been done. Sister Carrie was the result, and Loving's account of thewrit ing, editing, and reception of the novel offers a fascinating subtext on the conflict between venality and morality within theAmerican publishing industry of the time. Loving is never less than interesting on all aspects ofDreiser's lifeand work: his 'conversion' toCommunism, his interest in the embryonic Civil Rights movement, his protracted disputes with academia, and, particularly, his vexatious relationships with publishers. Loving notes thatwhile the initial reception of Sister Carrie left Dreiser penniless and suicidal, itwas the enthusiastic support of such important contemporaries as Frank Norris, W. D. Howells, and, above all,H. L. Mencken that eventually made Sister Carrie and its author famous. Loving argues thatDreiser's first wife, 'Jug',played a crucial role in editing themanuscript of Sister Carrie, and thatDreiser repaid her by being an inveteratewomanizer throughout his life.Over all, while Loving isnever censorious, he has notwritten a hagiography; he portrays Dreiser as not without faults, but nevertheless as a man who against all the odds produced an extraordinary body ofwork. ROEHAMPTONUNIVERSITY KEVIN MCCARRON 7ames Joyce and theDifference ofLanguage. Ed. by LAURENTMILESI. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Xiii+232 pp. ?40; $6o. ISBN 978-o-52i-62337-7. This collection of twelve essays centres on the idea that language isof paramount sig nificance in Joyce'swork-of greater importance than, say, character, social context, political direction, or sexual morality-and that Joyce's location and expression in language is thekey tohiswriting practice. All theconventional weights ofnineteenth century realist fiction (such as those just listed) become focused and transmogrified by Joyce'smeticulous attention to the language of his work. The essays themselves take differentpoints of departure to explore various aspects of this premiss, first in theEnglish ofDubliners, A Portrait, and Ulysses, then in the polyglot idiom ofmultiple languages and slippery puns of Finnegans Wake. Joyce 'poeticizes' and 'foreignizes' English, according toLaurent Milesi. Fritz Senn's essay 'SyntacticGlides' focuses on theanti-naturalist artificeof Joyce'swriting in refresh ingly close detail. Quoting fromUlysses, 'the sailor [. . .] the noise of his bilgewater [. . .] splashing on the ground', Senn points out that 'noises don't splash' (p. 33) and thereby opens up thewhole area of uncertainty between language and actuality 2I8 Reviews with which Joyce's writing engages. Benoit Tadie discusses Joyce's work in rela tion to contemporary linguistic theories, such as those of Saussure, Pound/Fenellosa, Malinowski, and Sapir, nicely concluding that Molly's night-time unravelling of the 'rational representations conceived in the daylight' (p. 56) link her toPenelope and 'the truth' is on her side. Beryl Schlossman discusses the role of the 'Madonnas of Modernism', connecting Joycewith Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Yeats while suggesting the essential connectedness ofmagic and desire, love,writing, and art. Marie-Dominique Garnier offers 'Joycewith Deleuze' in a pun-loaded essay on 'The Lapse and the Lap', where licking, lapping, milk, cats, and Lacan are recur ring tropes in amazy journey concluding with 'theOther' that 'duplicates the self' (p. I09). Thomas Docherty talks about...