“Community and Place”: The James Joyce Summer School, Dublin, Ireland, 5-11 July 2015

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Joyce’s writing is inextricably anchored in a place and time and, as such, demands to be read in the city of its inception and imagination: Dublin. Convened each summer since 1988 by University College Dublin (in collaboration with the National Library of Ireland and the James Joyce Centre), the James Joyce Summer School offers a rewarding opportunity to walk, read, and study in the city where Joyce lived literally in his youth and imaginatively throughout his life. This year’s School, under the direction of Anne Fogarty, marked the twenty-eighth annual gathering as Joyceans once again traveled to Dublin for an immersive week of study.

The James Joyce Summer School celebrates Joyce’s writing. To read his work is to plunge into Dublin and spend the remainder of the text—whether it encompasses the few pages of a short story or the epic pages of Ulysses—walking Dublin’s streets and meeting its citizens. Participants congregated in Newman House, the building where Joyce himself studied, and they crossed St. Stephen’s Green every day and traversed the streets near the James Joyce Centre, seeing the door behind which Leopold Bloom lived and standing under the hotel windows through which Gabriel Conroy watched the snow fall.

The School not only located Joyce in the geographic community of Dublin but also in his literary one. He was discussed as a member of the Irish literary community and of the literary canon. Fogarty opened the school on Monday with a lecture entitled “‘Love’s Bitter Mystery’: Reading Joyce and Yeats,” in which she charted the complicated relationship between the two iconic Irish writers both through their personal and literary interactions. This talk set the stage for Monday afternoon’s visit to “The Life and Works of W. B. Yeats” exhibit at the National Library of Ireland. Maria Kager’s presentation explored Joyce’s work in conjunction with that of Flann O’Brien in her discussion of bilingualism and its role in the works of these authors. Extending the literary community beyond national boundaries and time, the School’s lectures closed with Stephanie Nelson’s “Holding Back the Day: Molly’s Soliloquy, Athena, and the Suspension of Time in the Odyssey and Ulysses.” In this closing address, Nelson considered Joyce as a member of the Homeric literary community through her analysis of the way Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses reject being frozen in time.

Social activities also aligned Joyce with his literary community. In addition to visiting the National Library, participants had the opportunity to see Marsh’s Library, an eighteenth-century facility near St. Patrick’s Cathedral where Joyce researched Franciscan heresies, specifically those of Joachim Abbas as a young man, and they experienced the theatrical element of the Irish literary community by attending an outstanding production of Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman at the Abbey Theatre.

Members of the School formed smaller literary communities of their own throughout the week during each afternoon’s seminar meetings. These seminars (including ones on Dubliners led by Peter van de Kamp, Ulysses by Fritz Senn, Finnegans Wake by Terrence Killeen, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Christine O’Neill), consisting of undergraduates, graduate students, and senior Joyce scholars, spoke to the continual flourishing of the intergenerational Joycean community. Each session provided stimulating discussions about its chosen masterpiece. Bound together by Joyce’s words, these groups plunged into the details and intricate complexities of his writing and gained richer understandings of his masterworks.

While the local embodiments of Joyce’s fiction and the intellectual rigor of the lectures and lively small group discussions are certainly crucial components of the School, perhaps the most integral element is the collegiality of the Joycean community. In forming the group of individuals for this summer’s gathering, the School was attuned to the shape of Joyce’s life. He was frequently an exile...