Preface

This second volume of the reborn Joyce Studies Annual begins, fittingly, with a vivid retrospective by its progenitor, Thomas Staley, who launched the publication in 1989. Originally delivered as an address at the 2007 International James Joyce Conference in Austin, the essay summarizes Professor Staley’s “life with Joyce,” from his mesmeric discovery of “The Dead” as a teenager, to his founding of the James Joyce Quarterly and cocreation (with Fritz Senn and Bernard Benstock) of the first international Joyce symposium in the 1960s, to his tireless acquisition of Joyce papers for collections at Tulsa and Texas. Staley’s accounts of his research odysseys to Dublin, Trieste, and Paris are rich not only with comic anecdote but with a sense of curiosity and wonder that feels as fresh today as it was fifty years ago. So central has Staley been to Joyce studies over the past five decades that, in chronicling his own experiences, he provides an overview of the development of the entire field.

Recent years have seen not only escalating debates over the meanings of Joyce’s texts but also pitched legal controversies about the rights of scholars to quote from his journals, letters, and manuscripts. Robert Spoo and Carol Shloss offer two remarkable companion essays, adapted from their papers in the 2007 “Joyce and Copyright” plenary panel in Austin, that detail the recent, precedent-setting ruling in a lawsuit that Professor Shloss brought against the Joyce Estate over its copyright misuse and attempts to block a website containing materials excised from her biography of Lucia Joyce. Describing the background and history of this case from the complementary perspectives of attorney and author-plaintiff, respectively, Spoo and Shloss describe their successful challenge to the Estate’s confining approach to the concept of Fair Use and the triumphant settlement agreement that granted Shloss the ability to publish her supplemental materials in both electronic and print forms without fear of reprisal.

Legal drama has long attended the suppression and publication of Joyce’s work, and, as Alistair McCleery, William S. Brockman, and Ian Gunn demonstrate, court judgments can affect the transmission—or mistransmission —of the texts that we read. In providing a new, fuller history of the production of the error-plagued Random House 1934 edition of Ulysses, they recount how Judge Woolsey’s 1933 landmark decision prompted the company’s executives to rush production of its 1934 Modern Library edition, in their haste inadvertently setting the novel from a corrupt 1929 piracy. They argue that an indecisive Random House copyeditor with access to the more authoritative 1932 Odyssey Press version then compounded this error. Analyzing a marked copy of this two-volume Odyssey edition in the Ransom Research Center, they propose a revised sequence for the production of the Random House Ulysses, persuasively demonstrating that the copyeditor, faced with an exigent publication deadline, neglected to carry out a consistent reading of the page proofs and actually referred to the pirated edition in some instances. Scrupulously researched and intricately argued archival scholarship of this kind has long found a home in JSA, so it is entirely appropriate that these authors conducted their primary investigation at the research site that Thomas Staley directs.

Other ambitious essays in this collection reflect our intention to expand the traditional range of JSA by publishing works that draw upon emerging theoretical points of view. Three of these essays are concerned with the trope of sight in Joyce’s fiction. Garry Leonard uses the trans-disciplinary richness of Visual Studies to explore the epistemic, social, and economic implications of selective seeing in Dubliners. Analyzing the means by which certain things “become invisible” to Joyce’s characters, he provides a fascinating analysis of a culturally enforced screening process in “Araby” and “Counterparts,” and he goes on to link the practice of visual restriction to the theory of epiphanized objects in Stephen Hero. Sam Slote, adopting a telescopic perspective, entwines astronomical allusions in “Ithaca” to fashion an elegant reading of Bloom as an astral traveler whose comet-like appearances and disappearances find their figurative equivalent in Joyce’s multi-orbital “voyage of reference.” Although the language of stars links...