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  • “One Has Thoughts of That Eternal Rome”: A Report on the James Joyce Graduate Conference Sponsored by the James Joyce Italian Foundation, Università Roma Tre, 1-2 February 2008
  • M. Teresa Caneda Cabrera

The James Joyce Italian Foundation, founded two years ago, was officially launched with the celebration of its first academic event, a Graduate Conference hosted by the Dipartimento di Letterature Comparate of the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia at the Università Roma Tre, on 1-2 February 2008. Before the Irish Ambassador to Italy, His Excellency Sean O’Huiginn, officially opened the conference, with a warm speech in which he both noted the fruitful influence of Italy on Joyce and praised the contributions of Italian academics to Joyce scholarship, Franca Ruggieri, Professor of English at the host university and President of the JJIF, read a telegram sent by the General Secretary of the President of the Republic with the personal greetings of the Head of the State. The solemn opening featured also the interventions of Guido Fabiani, the Rector of Università Roma Tre, Michele Abrusci, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Otello Lottini, the Head of the Department of Comparative Literature. In their welcoming addresses, the speakers emphasized the emblematic position Joyce occupies within European literature and applauded the opening of Joyce studies for new generations of researchers. The name of Giorgio Melchiori, one of the most outstanding figures attached to the development of English studies and literary criticism in Italy, was frequently invoked during the two days of the Conference. Unfortunately, it was not possible for the Emeritus Professor to attend the launching of the JJIF, but his presence was nevertheless felt when his words of encouragement and support were read at the opening by John McCourt, who, together with Ruggieri and Enrico Terrinoni, was also responsible for the organization of the event. The official welcome ended with the intervention of Ruggieri who formally introduced the JJIF and explained that one of the objectives of the new foundation will be to promote the study of Joyce among students. In this respect, the president of the JJIF suggested that Joyce’s rebelliousness, manifested in his refusal to conform to the dictates of the market, should certainly attract the interest of young people.

Indeed, the James Joyce Graduate Conference provided researchers from all parts of Italy with a unique opportunity to talk about their own “work in progress” in a friendly atmosphere that encouraged interaction and discussion. In addition to the more than twenty participants from the Universities of Bari, Bologna, Firenze, Napoli, Torino, Verona, Roma Tre, La Sapienza, and Trieste, other nationalities [End Page 657] were also represented, since the Conference included about ten participants from North America, France, Germany, and even Iran. At the same time, Conference organizers assembled a diverse group of more established scholars and professors whose function was to act as chairs and respondents and included, among others, Jacques Aubert, Derek Attridge, Rosa Maria Bosinelli, Joan Fitzgerald, Carla Marengo, Laura Pelaschiar, Carla de Petris, Paola Pugliatti, Carolina Patey, Fritz Senn, and Jolanta Wawrzycka. Papers were thematically grouped in panels that dealt with a wide range of topics such as “Intermedial Joyce,” “Drama and Voice,” “Joyce and Other Writers,” “Ulysses,” “New Directions in Joyce Studies,” “Joyce and Biography,” and “Joycean Language and Translation.”

Attridge opened the academic program with a lecture entitled “Signature and Counter-signature: Derrida reads Ulysses.” Through his carefully modulated discussion of Jacques Derrida’s reading of Joyce, he invoked the opening session of the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium, held in Frankfurt in 1984, when a packed audience gathered to hear Derrida’s lecture “Ulysses Gramophone.” Since, obviously, most participants in the Graduate Conference were too young to have heard Derrida themselves, Attridge’s interpretative chronicle of what was doubtless a landmark event in twentieth-century literary studies was much appreciated. I would not dare to summarize here such a complex, well-structured, and thought-provoking lecture, which dealt with supremely difficult questions such as the meaning of reading, the act of critical judgment, and the paradoxical singularity of a text (constituted and conveyed only by its participation in general paradigms). Drawing on Derrida’s notions of signature and...

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