‘Living Texture:’: A Review of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 6–11 July 2015

Claire Culleton, in her lecture at the 2015 Dublin James Joyce Summer School, observed that Joyceans find themselves in a ‘decade of centenaries’, where we are marking anniversaries of Joyce’s compositions and publications, as well as major moments in Irish and European literary and political history. Given our position as celebrants of these centenaries, what better time then for Joycean scholars to immerse themselves in foundational interpretive histories while also revisiting and challenging critical commonplaces and assumptions. Just as the streetlamps illuminate ‘the living texture’ of summertime Dublin (and the perambulators Corley and Lenehan) in ‘Two Gallants’, so too does the annual meeting of the Summer School invite established and emerging scholars, students, and enthusiasts (and this year, a group of impressive and intrepid students from Chicago-area Oak Park and River Forest High School!), to come together in the city that formed the geographical grounding of Joyce’s writing, in order to explore the lively and supple texture of his literary work.

Indeed, many of the papers presented at this year’s Summer School initiated new conversations and interpretations of Joyce. The School was inaugurated by School Director Anne Fogarty’s lecture, ‘“Love’s Bitter Mystery”: Reading Joyce and Yeats.’ In her lecture, Fogarty challenged the typical view of the relationship between Joyce and Yeats as oedipal and derisive. Instead, by re-reading Joyce, she argues, we can see how Joyce adapted Yeats’s words (and the symbols of the Celtic Twilight more generally), and that their relationship therefore can be seen more as one of mutual authoring and haunting. Her talk was followed by that of Dieter Fuchs, whose lecture was entitled ‘Joyce’s Mythical Method: Undiscovered Intertextual Allusions in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’ Fuchs sought to challenge the primacy of ‘school-boy’ interpretations of the Daedalus/Icarus myth in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and suggested that scholars (as well as Stephen) have repressed or failed to acknowledge darker aspects of this myth, including the more scandalous blurring of humans and animals in Daedalus’s fabrication of the bull for Pasiphaë, and the resulting Minotaur. Paying closer attention to these facets of the story, Fuchs suggested, heralds new questions around paternity and scandal, as well as artistic production and self-conception in this novel.

The second day began with Claire Culleton’s ‘How Things Start in Dubliners.’ In this lecture, Culleton sought to move beyond the traditional readings of the collection, centred as they are on paralysis and the gnomon. Instead, she identified the image of the ‘thin end of the wedge’ in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ as a more compelling symbol for the narrative frame she put forward. Specifically, the wedge can divide characters and places, but it also forces action. Thus, by focusing on the beginning of the stories, where characters are wedged into some kind of motion or response, and by imagining potential action after the end of the story, she argued that Dubliners can also be a collection about movement, an interpretive shift that she noted resonates pedagogically with the political realities of contemporary students. Her talk was followed by Fritz Senn’s examination of ‘Joycean Parergonomics’. Through close readings of selected examples, Senn argued that allusions, parodies, and quotations, in addition to even the format and typography of the pages themselves, take on extra meanings and operate as a technique of ‘side effects’.

Maria Kager presented her paper ‘The Bilingualism of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien’ on the third day of the School. Her lecture positioned the bilingualism of the two authors as the governing force of much of their writing, whereas heretofore it has not usually been a point of comparison. Drawing on psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience, she traced the metalinguistic awareness and play in both authors as more than just polyglot experimentation. Specifically, she saw them as a function of bilingual code switching and dexterity. Day three also featured Timothy Martin’s lecture, ‘Elegaic Ulysses’. In his contribution to the School, Martin parsed Declan Kiberd’s...