“Open Spaces”: A Report on the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 7–13 July 2013

Sunday, 7 July 2013, marked the return of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School to the heart of the Hibernian metropolis, and, as usual, the event confirmed its status as an important fixture on the Joycean calendar. The initial gathering in Hourican’s Pub on Leeson Street was an upbeat affair as introductions were made and the school’s directors, Anne Fogarty and Luca Crispi of University College Dublin, welcomed this year’s contingent of participants. Fritz Senn, the patron of the school and director of the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich, arrived from the Trieste Summer School along with several students who would also be in attendance during the week in Dublin. Students and professors made their way to Milano’s in Dawson Street for dinner, and some later proceeded to Davy Byrne’s (Ulysses’s “moral pub”) to set the precedent for what would be a busy social, as well as academic, schedule of events.

Monday morning’s program in Newman House on Stephen’s Green was an auspicious overture to the week. The stolid physics theater from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man became a mass of gelid light and air, while the pollinous breeze from the adjoining Iveagh Gardens gave relief from a heat wave in what would be the finest Dublin summer in recent memory. In keeping with the collective urge to bask in the Dublin sunshine, Senn suggested that “Open Spaces” was the appropriate epithet for the 2013 Summer School, and indeed many of the lectures showed an affinity with this theme. In many ways, Joyce’s Dublin itself becomes an open space, and the Summer School is a microcosm of the global appeal of Joyce studies and the wealth of current research in the field. Past attendees often return in a lecture capacity—a process of matriculation that the school continues to encourage in exemplary fashion—and the event is a valuable index of the vitality of current and future scholarship.

In her plenary lecture, Fogarty explored the provenance of the traditional song “The Lass of Aughrim” in Joyce’s story “The Dead.” She traced its implications through a history of violence and colonial triumphalism and as a site of contestation between Protestantism and Catholicism and expanded the symbolism of Aughrim (a small village in County Galway) to signify the wider geopolitical context of the Williamite wars. As an exercise in cultural memory, Fogarty suggested, “The Dead” presents broken patterns that one “can never fully stitch together.” In a variation on the theme of openness, Aida Yared of Vanderbilt University delivered a talk entitled “Reading Ulysses as an Open Book,” during which postcards were distributed for the purpose of illustration. Following Umberto Eco’s The Open Work and via an analogy with the work of John Cage, she focused on the openness and aleatory dimensions of Ulysses’s textuality. Despite the multiplicity of Joyce’s “alphabet soup,” however, she argued that the notion of difficulty should not function as an obstacle to interpretation and enjoyment of the text.

Seminars began in the afternoon, with a focus on each of Joyce’s major works. Peter Van de Kamp convened the Dubliners group; A Portrait was taught by Christine O’Neill; Senn presided over Ulysses; and Katherine O’Callaghan conducted discussions of Finnegans Wake. The evening saw a trip to the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street, where students visited displays from the W. B. Yeats and newly installed John F. Kennedy exhibitions. Fiona Ross, Director of the National Library, and Ed Mulhall, a Joycean and the former Director of News at Raidió Teilifis Éireann, addressed the school on the continuing productivity of the library despite the effects of harsh budgetary cutbacks, noting how the digital catalogue has doubled in the past year.

On Tuesday, Senn elaborated on the expansiveness of the Dublin demotic in his lecture “Logodaedalia or Evading the Obvious.” Commenting on a city “saturated with echoes,” whose speech subverts expectations, Senn focused on the character of Lenehan as demonstrative of the way simple language inevitably becomes...