“We think of Rome, imperial, imperious, imperative”: A Report on the Seventh James Joyce Graduate Conference, Rome, Italy, 6-7 February 2014

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Following James Joyce’s 132th birthday on 2 February 2014, a group of aspiring graduates and scholars gathered in Rome for the VII James Joyce Italian Foundation Graduate Conference. The James Joyce Italian Foundation board members, Franca Ruggieri, the President, Carla Marengo Vaglio, John McCourt, Enrico Terrinoni, Sonia Buttinelli, Ira Torresi, and honorary members Umberto Eco and Fritz Senn, created a welcoming platform for Joyce scholarship to be shared amid Rome’s auspicious settings.

The conference was held at the Sala Conferenze “Ignazio Ambrogio,” Università degli Studi, Roma Tre, and began with the University President, Mario Panizza, Department Director, Giuseppe Grilli, and Franca Ruggieri welcoming delegates. With the theme of the conference set as “The Recirculation of Realism,” they highlighted some of the event’s central concerns, such as mimesis and opposition. In her opening plenary, Anne Fogarty gave an analysis of realism and affect in Dubliners. While she noted that the terms “affects” and “feelings” are often confused, she helpfully defined the former as those biochemical intensities that may be social, atmospheric, or of the body and explained how these might become historically coded. By focusing on Dubliners, she demonstrated the way Joyce’s characters sense affects such as discomfort and unease and project these outwards towards one another and the surrounding landscape. The second plenary was delivered by Fritz Senn who explored the difficulties of translation. He demonstrated how sentences might become different linguistic events in other languages using, among many examples, Gretta’s revelation in “The Dead” that “I was great with him” (D 220). By questioning the multiple meanings of Gretta’s words, Fritz demonstrated how the “realism” we might ascribe to Joyce’s work cannot always be wholly accurate. On the second day, Jolanta Wawrzycka provided a fascinating account of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century optical toys and, taking the magic lantern as her primary focus, revealed how the device could have influenced the tableau effects and eastern imagery in Dubliners. In the final plenary, Rosa Maria Bosinelli warned of the dangers of over-prescribing a specific reality to Joyce’s work, reminding us of the importance of analyzing internal emotions and the confusion over what is left unsaid.

The conference panels were made up of three or four Joyceans at various stages of their academic careers. The first was chaired by Anne Fogarty and consisted of Francesca Caraceni (University of Tuscia), Illaria Aletto (Università Roma Tre), and Victoria Lévêque (Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III). Caraceni’s paper considered Joyce and Laurence Sterne’s writing as a challenge to realism and examined the way in which formal literary experimentation can encourage a didactic reader-text relationship. Aletto gave a fascinating account of the wait for the 1993 unabridged, complete Russian translation of Ulysses, revealing that the delay lasted through almost the entire Soviet period! Presenting the audience with a photograph of Auguste Rodin’s “Meditation of the Inner Voice,” Lévêque drew comparisons between the statue and Gerty MacDowell and convincingly argued that the reality of perception in the “Nausicaa” episode prevents Bloom’s and Gerty’s experiences from being entirely satisfactory. She noted that the parallels between “Nausicaa” and Virginia Woolf’s work demonstrate the way these writers challenge the boundaries of the real via their ontological engagement with writing.

The second panel was chaired by John McCourt and included Sophie Corser (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Geraldina Colombo (Catholic University of Milan), and Neslihan Ekmekçioglu (Hacettepe University). Corser’s paper reminded us of the importance of the Uncle Charles principle and examined the self-referential nature of the “Eumaeus” episode of Ulysses, and she drew the audience’s attention to Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the “Odyssey”: A Novel and questioned how rewriting and authorial intention affect the reality of a text.¹ Colombo examined the often-neglected Chamber Music and suggested that the poems should be...