Preface

Wyndam Lewis once observed that "the schoolmaster" in Joyce was "in great evidence" in the pages of his fiction. A brilliant student and a language teacher himself, Joyce, not surprisingly, often staged scenes of pedagogy and instruction—formal and informal, captivating and confused—from Stephen's disquisition on aesthetics in Portrait to his fragmentary history class at Mr. Deasy's school in Ulysses to the Nightlessons episode of Finnegans Wake. Such scenes highlight the escalating challenges that his works pose for teachers, particularly those treating the Wake, which Kimberly Devlin describes as "a proliferation of signification, a vertiginous fantasy of possibilities" for both the novel's dreamers and its readers. While Devlin admits the impossibility of complete comprehension, in "Attempting to Teach Finnegans Wake" she offers an exceptionally lucid and helpful model for presenting this famously difficult and intimidating work to graduate students. To give new readers a "portal of entry," she recommends a careful analysis of ALP's "mamafesta," an untitled catalogue of titles that serves as an introduction to many of the novel's dominant leitmotifs and themes (particularly, the fall into eros, sin, and death) while providing paradigmatic illustrations of Joyce's language play. This opening strategy, Devlin notes, also allows an instructor to demonstrate the Wake's linguistic and structural multiplicity: A single name often encapsulates multiple images, and every phrase branches out to other points on the textual spider's web. Noting the importance of patiently unpacking the novel's portmanteaus, both in classroom and office discussions, Devlin provides illuminating examples from her list of favorite Wakean words and phrases. The ten-week introduction she adumbrates concludes with an investigation of the psychoanalytic texture and somatic dimensions of Joyce's dreamtext and its implied sleeper.

Philip Kitcher's essay, "Collideorscape: Finnegans Wake in the Large and in the Small," also addresses the vexing question of how to make the novel "less daunting" for the uninitiated reader, while at the same time recognizing and engaging its infinite complexities. Eschewing traditional emphases on verbal gamesmanship and meta-plots ("a poor return for scholarly industry"), Kitcher encourages us to embrace Joyce's invitation to "engage with lives in concrete complexity." Doing so brings into focus central questions that gnaw at the novel's central dreamer, HCE perhaps, during an almost unendurably long night: Has his seriously flawed life been worthwhile, can he "vindicate" his existence, and is "a stable and satisfying conception of life" possible? As the dreamer shifts from scene to scene, Kitcher urges readers to share the character's ontological yearnings and ethical anxieties in this "trial by kaleidoscope." Moving from this broad conceptual concern with a man's taking stock of his life, he offers a probing analysis of the "collideorscape" passage as a closely observed counterbalance to the philosophical "fargazing" that Joyce inculcates.

Margot Norris's extraordinarily rich reading of the social and cultural dimensions of the "high stakes" performance in "Scylla and Charybdis" treats one of the most complex and extended scenes of instruction in all of Joyce's work: Stephen's presentation of his Shakespeare theory. Drawing on Possible Worlds theory, Norris approaches Stephen's encounter with AE, Eglinton, Lyster, and Best (the fictional counterparts of real individuals) as an exercise in attempted "problem-solving." Impecunious, adrift, and banished from Dublin's elite artistic and publishing circles, Stephen carefully gauges his influential audience and tries to "earn acceptance with his brilliance." While Stephen's discourse on Hamlet has profound theoretical implications for his future art, Norris demonstrates that this "gambit" has equally compelling consequences for his immediate social and professional existence. By revealing how Stephen, like Shakespeare, exists as a man in his time—"an artist grounded materially and socially in his historical moment at the National Library"—she demonstrates that his most pressing aim is to "restore himself to his rightful place among the young poets and intellectuals" of Ireland.

Joyce's relations with the literary establishment were sometimes as strained as Stephen's, but Samuel Roth's unauthorized publication of episodes of Ulysses in his magazine Two Worlds Monthly in 1926 and 1927 prompted a much-celebrated International Protest of prominent...