The Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 2019: 'The Reader's Joyce'

Nestled in the heart of Dublin, the geographical centre of Joyce's fictions, the James Joyce Summer School offers rich ground for exploring Joyce's work and life. With no restrictions on theme or approach, lectures were broad in scope and divergent in focus, ranging from theoretical examinations of ecocriticism, disability studies, and mathematics to the more traditional classical, linguistic, and archival approaches. Following the morning lectures, these themes and ideas were closely discussed and analysed in daily afternoon seminars, where small groups of intergenerational Joyce scholars engaged in collaborative discussion and close readings. These specialized reading groups were held by experts in the field, with Peter van de Kamp running Dubliners, Christine O'Neill leading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Fritz Senn discussing Ulysses, and Terence Killeen navigating Finnegans Wake.

Following an informal gathering at Buswell's hotel on Sunday, 31 June, the school officially opened on Monday morning, marked by an address given by Luca Crispi, the School's Associate Director. As noted by Crispi and felt by many, it was with great sadness that Professor Anne Fogarty, the School's Director and the co-founder of the Dublin James Joyce Journal (with Luca Crispi), would be unable to join us that week, an absence which was felt throughout many of the week's activities. In his address, Crispi also highlighted the wonderful cyclical nature of the School, which sees bi-yearly participation by the students from Oak Park and River Forest High School, outside Chicago, a younger cohort of students who benefit from the rich intellectual engagement that the week offers. Also mentioned were those who had previously attended the school as graduate students only to return as invited lecturers. This year's example was post-doctoral researcher, Sophie Corser.

The topic of Joycean cyclicality led seamlessly into Crispi's opening lecture, where he discussed Joyce's 'stylistic contagion'. Highlighting the process by which Joyce detaches his writing from its real-life context, Crispi noted how Joyce adapts his semi-autobiographical notes and memories for a new physical and temporal setting through a process of 'fictionalizing' and 'hyperbolizing' his work. Focusing on early notebooks as evidence, Crispi examined the way Joyce wrote scenes featuring Stephen Dedalus for A Portrait that he later repurposed for Ulysses, resulting in a 'blending of consciousness', for Joyce cleverly carries forward the textual residue and stylized consciousness of young Dedalus as part of the character's later development.

Up next, Sam Slote explored the geographical significance of Joyce's Ulysses, using archival research to determine how directories of both Dublin and Gibraltar enabled Joyce to construct a 'mirage of geographical accuracy'. Slote noted that the morsels of information offered by the directories, such as Gibraltarian family and street names, function as 'indices of specificity', as concentrated layers of reference that enable Joyce to 'fake' geographical realism in 'Ulysses'.

The second day opened with Keri Walsh discussing Joyce's Exiles and fin de siècle theatres. Beginning with a contextual and biographical reading of Joyce's theatrical influences, Walsh observed how Exiles has been frequently viewed as an imitation of an Ibsen play. However, Walsh demonstrated how Joyce surpassed this form, for Exiles' use of Ibsenite naturalism is adapted with the influence of Symbolism and unintended audience laughter. Walsh demonstrated how the play thematically engages with naturalist influences through ironic engagements with stranger plot movements, concluding that Exiles offers a rich satire of male sexual privilege.

As usual, Fritz Senn provided the audience with a rich and fruitful account of the depths of the language in Ulysses, exploring the etymology of rumour and gossip and its roots in Joyce's work. Weaving the Odyssey and Ulysses, Senn showed how Homeric 'forgeries' form the basis of Ulysses, as Odysseus' spectacular ability to divulge rumours translates into Joyce's ability to 'forge a tale' through the shape-shifting nature of Joycean language.

Day three saw Maren Linett discuss the dialectic between modernism and disability in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Showing how modernist studies offers 'rich soil' for disability analysis as modernists were...