Raising the Wind

Transitions

In the last issue of the James Joyce Quarterly, we bid a heavy-hearted farewell to our long-time cartoonist Simon Loekle. For twenty-two years, his Dazibao panel ran in each issue of the journal. These clever images, often featuring Clancy the Cat, offered commentary not only on Joyce but on literature, art, and the challenge of fashioning a world from words. As Carol Kealiher noted in her own remembrance in Vol. 51.2–3, Simon was at once learned and light-hearted—in my experience, a relatively unique combination. We saw that personality emerge in cartoons that became as familiar a part of the JJQ as the Checklist and our conference reports.

Although we cannot replace Simon, we have decided to keep up the tradition of featuring a regular cartoon in JJQ—a little something to add visual zest and even some humor to our often serious scholarly work. I’m thus pleased to welcome Robert Berry to the journal. His work should be familiar to anyone who has followed the expansive Ulysses “seen” project, which Rob and his collaborators have led since 2009. This serialized adaption of Joyce’s novel seeks to transform it into the language of comics through a series of striking visual experiments.

Originally trained as a painter, Rob now works primarily as a cartoonist, illustrator, and digital artist. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently developing a course on visualizing Ulysses that blends art, literature, and the digital humanities. We’ve featured one of his extraordinary illustrations for a new edition of “The Dead” on the cover of this issue. And inside, you’ll find his first contribution: a brilliantly colored set of panels in which Molly Bloom springs powerfully to life. In addition to his regular feature, Rob will also publish occasional illustrations and cartoons. Please join me in welcoming him to the JJQ.

Since 1982, the James Joyce Quarterly has shared offices with Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature—a long-standing partnership between two journals that still proudly maintain their financial and editorial independence from both for-profit publishers and larger university presses. In its most recent issue, Laura Stevens penned her final Preface as she stepped down after an illustrious decade as editor.

Her reflective, often moving envoi deftly interweaves her thoughts on the journal’s changing mission, the still flickering visibility of women’s writing, the challenges of global scholarship, and the risks of recent calls for open access. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, she writes,

is about the importance of being seen. . . . There is a difference between including some women in a male-dominated canon and rewriting the history of literature so that it includes women alongside men with full attention to the impact of sex and gender on individuals’ access to the means of writing and the pathways through which they can bring their work to the attention of others.

This entire preface is freely available at the journal’s website, so take a moment to read it, to learn something about the vital mission of this journal, and to spend some time with an accomplished editor working through the complex challenges and exciting opportunities that now inform feminist scholarship.

With the next issue, the journal’s editorship passes to Jennifer Airey, Associate Professor of English at the University of Tulsa and an expert on women’s writing in the eighteenth century. She inherits a rich legacy clearly made stronger by Professor Stevens’s able, innovative leadership.

Clive Hart
1931–2016 [End Page 564]