“that which is common to us all”: Karl Ove Knausgaard as Reader of Joyce

David Rando's meticulous and thought-provoking Modernist Fiction and News nevertheless begins with a somewhat misleading title. Rando is less concerned with specific news sources or the publication history of little magazines, and much more interested in “the news” broadly conceived in opposition, and apposition, to modernist literature. Rando's main interest is the important ways in which literary output in the early twentieth century—he concentrates on works appearing in the 1930s—reacted to and against the proliferation of newsprint in the space of the “media ecology,” building on Mark Wollaeger's 2006 Modernism, Media and Propaganda.Literature, according to Rando, both appropriates and questions the methods used in popular newspapers, using techniques like “nearness” and “delay” to open up an anecdotal space within the story itself. Rando draws heavily on Benjamin's writings about the modes of experience to lay out his argument; Benjamin also gets the very first lines of the book: “Every instant brings us news from across the globe, yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. The previous sentence is adapted from Walter Benjamin's statement in his 1936 essay, ‘The Storyteller’; I have substituted ‘instant’ for ‘morning’ and perhaps that is modification enough to make Benjamin's idea absolutely contemporary” (1).The idea of contemporaneity saturates this book, and Rando is at pains to stress the relevance of his comments about the relationality of literature and newsprint to current times: “Modernist novelists are … the first tentative denizens of the information age who responded creatively, and thus, for us, importantly, to a media environment and public orientation toward experience that has by now become quite naturalized” (23). Nearness, contiguity in time and space on multiple levels, is an important thematic concern: there is first the nearness of a page of newsprint, where each story bears little or no relation to the one contiguous to it except a random simultaneity; contrasted to this is the nearness engendered by Benjamin's idea of the anecdote, where authorial specificity “shocks” the reader into an immediate awareness of events in a way that the newspaper never can. In other words, the physical nearness of news stories on the printed page paradoxically results in a distancing and flattening of affect that, for Rando as for Benjamin, is a problem addressed through literature: “[M]odernists perceived a growing distance between news reporting and lived experience, and they developed and honed narrative techniques and an experimental resolve that made nearness and experience defining values. Improving on what the newspaper promised but failed to do, modernist novelists hoped not just to ‘make it new,’ but also to ‘make it near’” (18).To this end, Rando devotes his attention in this slim volume to a “limited” set of literary texts that includes Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Dos Passos's U.S.A., and Stein's three major autobiographical works, as well as the many references to Benjamin's writing, especially from The Arcades Project (20). He invokes Derrida's Archive Fever to theorize about the simultaneous acts of recording and repression involved in modernist literature's desire to be a better record of the times than newsprint could be. Rando's bibliography is both current and theoretically rigorous, and his revisiting of critical texts like Andreas Huyssen's After the Great Divide (1987) revitalizes older works that have already had an important impact on the field of modernist studies.The chapter titled “Nearness” begins Rando's exploration of literary space and Benjamin's understanding of experience. Beginning with the division between erfahrung and erlebnis, Rando explains that the move from the former toward the latter parallels the move from anecdotal, personal storytelling toward nuggets of information for immediate consumption, that is, the news. In this light, modernist fiction's use of the newspaper both as raw material for plot and also as props within stories, becomes a resistance to the assimilative, easy-to-consume nature of news media. Reading Woolf's “The Mark on the Wall,” Rando shows how the narrator's opening refusal to date the story “reclaim[s] an experience in time and an experience of time … [that] will form the antithesis to the newspaper's homogenous, empty time, which is held off until the very end of the story” (40). Narrative twists are tied up with formalist experiments, so that we might identify in Woolf's stream of consciousness style “a sustained fantasy that explanations and facts can be indefinitely suspended, that one might dwell in illegitimate freedom, be released from the illusion that knowledge must be cobbled together from facts, and be exempted from the compulsion to live in the world clocked and charted by homogenous, empty time” (43).Rando suggests that if newsprint can be thought of as the “conscious,” linear, all-inclusive archive, then modernist literature becomes the “unconscious,” immediate, experiential one, working with and against its other, simultaneously imitating its methods even while it questions its claims to superiority and truth. Fiction becomes not simply contra facts but a more invidious version of them. It demands that readers substitute the idle act of empathy, which comes from reading news, for the shock caused by the “pathos of nearness” brought on by anecdotal literature.In the chapter entitled “Scandal,” Rando takes on Finnegans Wake and stresses its anecdotal nature as “a space where experience can emerge with a striking and unexpected intimacy not found in a newspaper, and where history that threatens to become abstract can concretize on a human scale not often found in traditional historiography” (53). Rando's comments on Joyce vis-à-vis Dante recalls some more recent work,1 but avoids convergences between Joyce criticism and genetic criticism.2 Benjamin's idea of the “pathos of nearness,” so central to Rando's own argument, comes from the former's “First Sketches,” for the The Arcades Project, and is itself therefore a tacit invitation to further consider literary revisions as an avenue for criticism. Although Rando does not develop this insight, his work perhaps provides fruitful avenues for further inquiry.In any case, Rando begins his chapter on Joyce and scandal with a discussion of HCE's “incident” in the park and draws on the work of other literary critics, Margot Norris and Wollaeger among them, to point out that the book “embarrasses the desire of news to extract reportable events from personal experience [and brings] scandal from the distant spheres of news into the intimate space of readers” (62). While this part of the chapter might sound familiar to those who have already spent time with the Wake, the second half uses the 1922 murder case against Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson and builds on the work of previous critics to demonstrate how Joyce's book of the night can be read as a series of “nested books” (72), the stories within stories loosely contained by the overarching text. The adulterous romance between Bywaters and Thompson nests inside the description of Paolo and Francesca, which is itself framed in the playacting between Glugg (Shem) and Issy, and the passage ends with one finger pointed outward, implicating the audience, with one word of sympathy: “Sowouyou.”3 Rando is best when he stops to dwell in close reading a single paragraph or even a line, and his claim that in each nested story “there exists a moment of pathos in which reports and events fall away and leave unframed experience in their stead, experiences that creep up and spring upon swooning observers” (71) is entirely convincing.Rando's obvious enjoyment in the complexities of Stein and Joyce that open his book poses some danger to the rest of the volume: subsequent texts seem to pale in comparison. He faces this problem in the third chapter, where the discussion of Dos Passos's trilogy is prefaced by the observation that the liquidation of character in the Wake is only one of the ways in which modernism tries to clear a space for itself in the media ecology. Dos Passos “writes characters right on the edge of the news” in a story that has been called “plotless, or propelled forward only by historical circumstances” (74–75). Thus, “[i]f Finnegans Wake denies all abstract contexts that would remove experience from its human scale, then Dos Passos's strategy is much the opposite … characters are seen from [a] great height, almost as mere side effects of news and history” (77). This examination of character leads Rando to deeper insights about language and nationhood that are closely tied to his opening injunction that we look to the modernists' “public orientation toward experience.” In a passage that can equally be read as literary criticism and political commentary, Rando notes, “For Dos Passos, the powerful continue to pervert the radically and distressingly malleable language of America for the purposes of domination, while the powerless seek to reinforce and rebuild the language of freedom upon which America was said to be founded” (86). Linking power, language, and the media ecology together, Rando concludes that “we see different strata of power productively engaged in struggle and disputation of the same single language, in the same way that Dos Passos self-consciously sculpts his narrative out of the common language and media space he shares with the news” (94).Rando's final two chapters, “Identity” and “War,” concentrate on Stein's autobiographical works, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas certainly, but more so Everybody's Autobiography and Wars I Have Seen, to show how the anecdotal form is used masterfully to break conventions of autobiographical writing as well as news reporting, so that one is “transformed from the empathetic newspaper reader to one who experiences a pathos of nearness” (111). These two chapters function like mirrors to each other, the first explaining Stein's pains to find an autobiographical mode that has no ending, and the second contrasting war news stories to assert the central truth about war, that it is made up of “endings of all kinds—of stories, of lives, the war, and, finally, Wars I Have Seen itself” (120). It is chiefly and most fruitfully in this last chapter that Rando turns to Derrida's ideas about archive fever, the simultaneous recording and suppressing of experience with which a testament like Wars necessarily engages. Again, Rando brings up the thorny relationship between news media and works of fiction that are forced to share the same media ecology, and shows how War both uses and abuses the techniques of reportage (one of the ironies of a book focused on “being existing,” or lived experience, is that it was marketed as war reportage when first published in 1945, and Rando dwells on the deliciousness of this). If Everybody's Autobiography is a book that is concerned with showing the hollowness of an always-already completed authorial “I” engaging with its own past, War, to Rando, is primarily concerned with ending, a (to quote Benjamin) “Messianic cessation of happening.”4 Of course, in the clash between the “real” and created worlds, there can be no ultimate contest, and Rando considers that fact: “Practically nothing can finally distinguish modernist fiction from news. The privileged sphere of the ‘literary’ is now everywhere and nowhere. The purview of news is finally everything. Between Stein and [war reporter Ernie Pyle] … there is little besides the ability to end, arrest, or stand still that can distinguish them. But it may be that this is no small difference in the age of endless information” (137).Rando's very last chapter is a brief statement he calls “Coda: Make It Now” in which he argues emphatically for the need to presume that “modernism matters most right now, and always has” (143). He cites recent work by Keith Williams and Patrick Collier, as well as Wollaeger, to assert that one must read modernism's questions and comments as relevant to our current perceived crisis in the news media. One cannot resist the rightness of his assertions—I wonder how many modernists would deny that they, at least, find the issues brought up by modernist writers relevant to their own daily, lived experiences. But Rando desires to reach beyond the literary reader, to the socially conscious and politically active one, the reader of works like Tom Fenton's Junk News: The Failure of the Media in the 21st Century (2009), which title he quotes as an example of how relevant modernist anxiety about news media is to the present day. This desire to “make now” some of the most obtuse works of modernist fiction to the field of cultural studies best further commentary. Rando's call to “make it now” strikes most powerfully in an example that he includes in his introduction but never revisits: Toni Morrison's refashioning of the real-life tale of Margaret Garner in Beloved. This novel, as opposed to Finnegans Wake or Everybody's Autobiography, say, is an example of a book that can equally be found in a small lending library or book club as in a classroom or literary investigation. It thus best demonstrates the political angle that Rando is at pains to stress: that the techniques of struggle used by fiction writers against the influence of news media can fruitfully be adapted by contemporary writers as well. Morrison's book is the best example of how Rando's conclusions about Woolf's resistance to reported time, Joyce's flirtations with scandal and immediacy, Dos Passos's refusal of historical determinacy through characterization, and Stein's ambivalence about beginnings and endings might all usefully and accessibly be applied to break the chains of constant and never-ending RSS feeds.Ultimately, this book provides a small Benjaminian shock of warning: it does not do to be glib about the shortcomings of hard-nosed commercial news media. Its strength, however, is when it ignores this larger context and concentrates on the playful, erudite reworkings of ordinary life that make up so much of modernist literature.

Has Clodd's Story of Alphabet come? asked Joyce in a letter sent to Sylvia Beach in September 1926.1 Although it never found a place in catalogues of Joyce's libraries, Edward Clodd's history of alphabet left numerous traces in three of Finnegans Wake notebooks, as Vincent Deane and Danis Rose first revealed in a series of articles published in Finnegans Wake Circular in late 1980s.2 In vi.B.15, vi.B.35, and vi.B.49b, Joyce entered around 139 jottings excerpted from pp. 16 to 227 of Clodd's book. Many of these remained unused - as is indicated by fact that many of Joyce's scribbles remain uncrossed - but Joyce's notes nonetheless betray a fairly sustained and broadly linear encounter with its contents.3The Story of Alphabet was first published in 1900 in George Newnes's Library of Useful Stories, which The Spectator, quoted on an advertising flyleaf at back of book, described as A very useful series of small manuals on subjects of common interest.4 An evolutionary anthropologist, Clodd had already authored such titles as The Story of Primitive Man, Pioneers of Evolution, and The Story of Creation. The Story of Alphabet chronicles stages of the triumph of human mind over one of most difficult tasks to which it could apply itself, revealing laws of development by which letters of alphabet came into existence and into common usage.5 The Introduction - or Introductory as it is called on page - begins with a thought-provoking sally:'What is ever seen is never seen', and it may be questioned if one in ten thousand of readers of to-day ever pauses to ask what is history of conventional signs called alphabet, which, in their changes of position, make up symbols of hundred thousand words and more contained in a comprehensive dictionary of English tongue.6This opening, with its emphasis on arbitrariness and conventionality of signs that constitute our alphabet, on its paradoxical invisibility in ordinary experiences of reading, and on varying changes of position by which all words are produced, strikes to core of Joyce's handling of alphabetical sequence. Joyce's works evince a fascination with interplay between alphabetic seriation and alphabetic permutation, revelling in productive divisibility of words into their constituent parts. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce's emancipation of letter, partly inflected by his reading of Clodd, reaches its apogee. But this essay will show that his attention to alphabetical series and symbolic potential of its individual units goes back to very beginning of his writing career, and that, from outset, he works to derail automatism which in act of reading irresistibly agglutinates letters into words, and words into lines, sentences, and paragraphs.Letters and their RhythmsThe first signs of Joyce's interest in individual letters are to be found in Stephen Hero, in which we read of fiery-hearted (sh 80) protagonist thatHe sought in his verses to fix most elusive of his moods and he put his lines together not word by word but letter by letter. He read Blake and Rimbaud on values of letters and even permuted and combined five vowels to construct cries for primitive emotions.SH 32Stephen synthesizes inchoate cries from a subset of letters, vowels: AEiOu. His efforts are at least partly ridiculous: exclamations such as 'aou', 'aie', and 'ouia', are hardly original finds. Yet process - which involves amalgamating individual letters to derive certain sounds rather than transliterating sounds into symbols - is at least unusual, and literary precedents in whose name Stephen carries out his experiments are august.Blake on Values of LettersThe allusion to William Blake is a reference to Jerusalem: The Emanation of Giant Albion (1804-1820), vast national epic Blake wrote as a monumental equivalent to Milton's History of England. …

‘A publication in post-First World War Paris’ provides an overview of James Joyce’s major works, including Ulysses, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegans Wake. The theme of exile is central to much of Joyce’s work, as well as questions of sexuality and the rejection of the Catholic Church. The concern with sexuality led many to try and censor Joyce’s work. Thus, his work was often subjected to censorship and criticism. Despite being considered to be the greatest master of prose fiction writing in English, Joyce’s work had to overcome innumerable legal difficulties to find an audience.

A Note on Edmund Epstein John Tytell Universally acknowledged as the most brilliant member of a distinguished English department, Eddie came to Queens College in 1974 after a decade at Southern Illinois University. He had attended Yale and Columbia as a graduate student and Queens College as an undergraduate so his appointment violated the general bias against an academic nepotism that prevented most institutions of higher learning from hiring its own graduates. But Eddie was an exception, and rules, even unofficial protocol guidelines, sometimes need to be reinterpreted. I knew Eddie from the time of his arrival at Queens College and could establish several points of personal connection. Eddie was a Joyce scholar, and I was writing a biography of Ezra Pound who had helped James Joyce early in his career so the evolution of Anglo-American literary modernism became a shared subject area. I was a Jewish European immigrant like his parents, and I had the additional advantage of a mother who had been raised in Dublin in a flat with a wooden tub. When I told Eddie that, every afternoon on the way home from school, my mother was expected to stop at the corner pub and fetch a wooden pail of stout for her father, he was charmed, fully aware that she could have figured in Joyce’s Dubliners. Generous, humane, loved by the best of our students, he spent [End Page 225] his academic career studying, teaching, and writing about Joyce, an expatriate from Dublin who taught in the Berlitz system in Trieste and then moved to Paris where a bookseller named Sylvia Beach chose to publish his masterpiece, Ulysses, now considered the supreme artistic achievement in the art of the novel written in the English language in the twentieth century. Joyce, whose earlier work, the realistic stories of Dubliners and the more modernistic A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, had already been published, then spent several decades creating what may be considered the most ambitious fiction of any century, Finnegans Wake, a huge compendium written in a highly charged paralanguage that reinvented artistic possibilities while exploring the very roots of all language. Its problem for the general audience, however, was its incomprehensibility, a code that, like the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or Mayans, needed to be explored and explained. Eddie, always so unpretentious and affable, was up to such a task because he knew more about the origins of language and the etymologies of its words than any other member of my department. He taught like a rabbinical Talmudist who would not rest until he could annotate everything in reach, so his classes were often fascinating footnotes into a vital, formative past. As a colleague, he was eminently approachable and congenial, full of good cheer and encouragement, and I will always remember him as a short, rotund man full of cherubic glee and a touch of whimsy in his eyes, singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs and accompanying himself on the piano at department parties twenty years ago. I asked Eddie to volunteer to help evaluate student eligibility for Phi Beta Kappa—a task that required the sacrifice of many hours involving the close examination and discussion of transcripts—and he generously gave us years of scrupulous commitment. When I asked him to write for American Book Review, a magazine I was editing, his reviews were incisive and penetrating. I knew Eddie had publishing experience and once, when I was having trouble finding a publisher for a book I was writing, he advised me to submit to Routledge, a fine choice for scholarly monographs but one that could not satisfy my ambitions to discover a larger audience for literature or to get paid for my efforts. Before embarking on academic life, Eddie had worked in publishing as an editor of Capricorn Books at Putnam’s and later for Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. At Capricorn, he took the risk of reprinting an allegorical fable that had only sold 2383 copies in its American hard-cover edition about children on a deserted island devolving to savagery. The Lord of the Flies was by an unknown author named William Golding, and it had been a modest...

This article examines the presence of apian life in James Joyce’s body of work in light of Maurice Maeterlinck’s discovery at the turn of the twentieth-century that honeybees communicate using a complex system of language. In December 1903, Joyce offered to translate Maeterlinck’s book-length study La Vie Des Abeille (The Life of the Bee) (1901) for the Irish Bee-Keeper, and the pages of the journal later resurface on a book-cart in Ulysses. Beginning with a discussion of the ‘economy of bee life’ in Stephen Hero, this article explores Joyce’s career-long fascination with nonhuman modes of communication, tracing his fascination with apian intelligence through close readings of Bloom’s bee-sting in Ulysses, as well as through the swarm of references that appear in Finnegans Wake. Finally, it argues that bees offer new ways of reading Joyce’s work, opening up new lines of connection between the fields of literary criticism and apiculture, and drawing the reader’s attention to the peripheral hum or murmur at the edges of human speech.

Reviewed by: Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught Annika J. Lindskog (bio) SAVING LUCIA, by Anna Vaught. Hebden Bridge: Bluemoose Books, 2020. 185 pp. £9.99. Following Carol Loeb Shloss’s 2003 biography of Lucia Joyce, several fictional portraits have appeared of James Joyce’s daughter.1 She figures in several plays, such as Michael Hasting’s Calico and Sophia Ginsburg’s L, and she is the subject of several works of fiction, most notably Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, and Alex Pheby’s Lucia.2 Collectively, these works suggest that Lucia has come to embody a specific position not only within the biographical context of her father’s life but also in culture at large: she has become a symbol of an abused and traumatized woman—misunderstood and disturbed, silenced and forgotten. With Saving Lucia, the British author Anna Vaught adds to this growing body of biographical fiction. Her novel—like Moore’s Jerusalem and Pheby’s Lucia—is set in St. Andrew’s psychiatric hospital in Northampton, United Kingdom, where Lucia Joyce was incarcerated in 1951 and where she eventually died in 1982. Not much is known about her long stay at St. Andrew’s, mostly due to the fact that her nephew, Stephen Joyce, destroyed what remained of her correspondence and a rumored novel manuscript in 1988. Perhaps this lack of information is also the reason why the hospital has become an ideal setting for works of fiction that seek to liberate Lucia, both from her supposedly destructive family and from her incarceration: it provides a blank slate for imagining how a talented young woman would end up locked away from the rest of the world. As the title of Vaught’s novel suggests, this, too, is a work of fiction that seeks to free Lucia from the circumstances of her life. To a large extent, it does so by questioning the idea of insanity that Lucia has come to symbolize: her position as the “dotty daughter of the genius writer” (2). It positions her in the midst of three other women of somewhat similar status. The first of these, Lady Violet Gibson, is the central character of the novel, despite its title and the fact that it is Lucia who narrates. A fellow patient at St. Andrew’s until her death in 1956, Gibson’s claim to fame is her attempted murder of Benito Mussolini in 1926, which failed spectacularly; her shot barely grazed the tip of the Fascist leader’s nose. It is Gibson who mostly speaks in Vaught’s novel, while Lucia both reports on and takes part in her imagined excursions. As part of these, Gibson gives voice to two other women: Blanche Wittmann, one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s most famous hysteria patients at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, and Bertha Pappenheim, who has become known as Anna O. through Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria.3 Placing Lucia among these three other supposedly “lunatic” women makes it clear that Vaught’s novel is more engaged in exploring [End Page 221] a general idea of insanity—perhaps especially in connection with gender—than in depicting Lucia Joyce’s life. Despite the fact that Lucia, the narrator, claims early on that what she is writing is “a more-or-less true story,” there is little inclusion of known biographical facts (2). The famous father is only mentioned sporadically and briefly, either as a genius writer or a loved and concerned “daddy” (11). Throughout, Nora Joyce is referred to as “the barnacle,” the “lower case for disrespect” (11). But neither parent forms a presence in the novel; they are only perfunctorily referred to, and their relationships to their daughter remain without any depth. Somewhat similarly, when Saving Lucia alludes to Joyce’s works, it tends to include the reference, as in “Lucia’s father wrote of those [slums] in Dubliners, you know” or “I remember [Daddy] spoke about liberating sounds—and this is what he did in Finnegans Wake—from their servile contemptible role” (97, 109). The most annoying bits of biographical information wedged into the text are those that refer to things yet...

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies

At what was to be their last meeting, Stanislaus Joyce attempted to enlist his brother James's support for his own antifascist sentiments-views that were to lead eventually to his internment in Florence as an enemy alien. It was upon that occasion that Joyce relieved himself of opinion quoted above. It may be dubious quality of such assertions that has given rise to a tradition in Joyce criticism that derides what Joyce had to say in his literary works but praises way in which it is said. Malcolm Cowley, for instance, wrote that Joyce's opinions were generally of a fourthor fifth-rate mind,2 while Harry Levin, in his critical study of Joyce, says that the student who demands a philosophy from Joyce will be put off with an inarticulate noise and a skeptical shrug.3 Most students of Joyce would agree that intrinsic intellectual value of what Joyce generally had to say is not on a par with those writers who, like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or Proust, most frequently populate essays on ideas in literature. Jung's early appraisal of Ulysses, Du sagst nichts und verrtitst nichts, O Ulysses, aber du wirkst,4 would seem final word on matter. But there is danger of overstatement in this tradition. This essay will try to show that some of positions and insights articulated or developed by Joyce in his works are of independent value and interest, especially to readers interested in understanding better development of artistic temperament and nature of its products. There is no subtler treatment of a gifted child's aesthetic development than that to be found in Joyce's early work. In his strongly autobiographical stories and novels (Dubliners, A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man, and Stephen Hero) and in his only play (Exiles) one finds not only a psychologically intriguing profile of

'The Tommy Moore Touch':Ireland and Modernity in Joyce and Moore Emer Nolan (bio) In A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus expresses his disdain for Thomas Moore, author of the Irish Melodies and the most popular Irish writer of the nineteenth century. As he passes 'the droll statue of the national poet of Ireland' in College Green, Stephen remarks on the figure's 'servile head', describing Moore as a 'Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian' (P V.216-21).1 In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom sees the same statue and comments, with an ironic nod to one of the best-known Melodies, that '[t]hey did right to put him over a urinal: meeting of the waters' (U 8.414-15). Moore is apparently a despised figure, but perhaps here as elsewhere, Stephen's contempt is in fact a measure of his intense involvement. In spite of his occasional scorn for Moore, Joyce refers to the Melodies throughout his works, alluding to every one of them in Finnegans Wake: he takes their appeal seriously and clearly was not immune to it himself.2 Louis Gillet recalls how Joyce would play 'his treasury of Irish melodies' on the piano in Paris, his listeners 'suspended on the doleful and nostalgic cadences'.3 On one occasion in A Portrait, Stephen returns to 'the chaos and misrule' of his father's house and finds his younger brothers and sisters singing Moore's 'Oft in the Stilly Night' over the remains of their tea and bread: He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life's journey they seemed weary already of the way. [...] He heard the choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied through an endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations of children: and heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurring note of weariness and pain. All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it. And he remembered that Newman had heard this note also in the broken lines of Virgil giving utterance, like the voice of [End Page 64] Nature herself, to that pain and weariness yet hope of better things which has been the experience of her children in every time (P IV.593-605).4 Through the medium of a popular song, Stephen makes connections between the present, past generations, Newman, Virgil, and finally 'Nature's children' - human beings. In a style which anticipates 'The Dead' and even Finnegans Wake, a single, rather lowly fragment of Irish culture yields a vision of shared experience. In such instances, Joyce proves himself to be a partial exception to the early twentieth-century flinch from Moore's 'servility' and 'inauthenticity', acknowledging the element of utopian longing as well as the sentimental nostalgia in his music. In a 1979 tribute to Moore, Seamus Heaney remarks that modern Ireland rescinded Moore's title of 'national bard' because his characteristic tone was 'too light, too conciliatory, too colonisé' for a nation 'whose conscience was being forged by James Joyce, whose tragic disunity was being envisaged by W.B. Yeats and whose literary tradition was being restored by the repossession of voices such as Aodhagán O Rathaille's or Brian Merriman's'. Heaney recalls: Yet this was the note I often heard coming over the wireless from Athlone in the forties, the note that John McCormack struck, the note that was struck in the schoolroom for generations. This was the music of what happened in the sentimental national heart, where Tara and Avoca and Lough Neagh's banks glimmered fitfully in the light of other days. Before I read my Corkery [...] my own sense of an Irish past was woven from the iconography of AOH [Ancient Order of Hibernians] banners and phantoms out of Moore's Melodies.5 Heaney had listened to Radio Éireann from Northern Ireland. He does not suggest that Moore's Melodies resonated any differently for Catholics on the northern side of the Irish border. Rather, he focuses on a division within Anglophone Irish culture, between writers devoted to cultural revivalism or modernist...

The eighth episode of Book I of Finnegans Wake consists of a series of gossips between two washerwomen, who gush out all the rumors about HCE(Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker) and ALP(Anna Livia Plurabelle). Here, HCE’s fall caused by gossips resembles Parnell’s downfall; HCE and ALP’s marriage allegorizes early colonial history of Ireland. Much like Shem who writes with his own excrement like ink, these washerwomen rewrite HCE and ALP’s stories and Irish history using the dirty water from their laundry. Their uncouth gossips provide alternative, unofficial history retold obliquely. In his earlier works, Joyce expresses his anxiety over English, the colonizer’s language, as the tool of his art. What Joyce does in Finnegans Wake is not imitation but echo. Echo does not seek for perfection. The language of Finnegans Wake is not English but the echo of English, which is amputated, fragmented, and hybridized. It does not permit any space for cultural hegemony or power of the British Empire. Much like echo, gossips also disrupt the authority and authenticity of official historiography. In case of Parnell, gossip played a huge role in his downfall. Gossips can be an alternative vehicle to shape and reshape history/historiography. In a word, this essay aims at rereading the washerwomen’s gossips about HCE and ALP as an alternative historiography. To conclude, gossips exercise a centrifugal force to spread out alternative, heterogeneous, versions of official historiography, which wields a centripetal force to assimilate various voices into a homogeneous version.

This is the first book to examine in full the interconnections between Giambattista Vico’s new science and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Maintaining that Joyce is the greatest modern “interpreter” of Vico, Donald Phillip Verene demonstrates how images from Joyce’s work offer keys to Vico’s philosophy. Verene presents the entire course of Vico’s philosophical thought as it develops in his major works, with Joyce’s words and insights serving as a guide. The book devotes a chapter to each period of Vico’s thought, from his early orations on education to his anti-Cartesian metaphysics and his conception of universal law, culminating in his new science of the history of nations. Verene analyzes Vico’s major works, including all three editions of the New Science . The volume also features a detailed chronology of the philosopher’s career, historical illustrations related to his works, and an extensive bibliography of Vico scholarship and all English translations of his writings.

The idea that Joyce’s multilingual experimentations and translational writing style are a reflection of his exposure to linguistic diversity during his voluntary exile has already been advanced by Italian scholar Serenella Zanotti (2013). This article expands on this observation and highlights the fact that the Irish author’s real-life multilingualism was never static. Rather, Joyce’s multilingual and translingual experience constantly evolved throughout his life as a three-times migrant to cosmopolitan European cities (Trieste, Zurich, Paris). This eventually resulted in a cosmopolitan inner language. This paper therefore argues that Joyce’s migration experience is at the basis of his evolving literary translanguaging or, in other words, that the latter should be seen as the textual reflection of his constantly growing personal exposure to different languages in cosmopolitan environments. Each translinguistic instance should therefore be considered in light of the specific spatio-temporal situatedness it originated from. Using Joyce’s correspondence in addition to his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939) as examples, this article will explore how Joyce’s literary use of language(s) evolved hand-in-hand with a growing metalinguistic awareness and crosslinguistic agility, which characterized his everyday use of language as a multilingual speaker. Finally, this article will reflect both on the implications that Joyce’s use of language(s) has for the translation of his literary works, as well as on his contribution to the issue of migration and identity.

n A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen points out that his recourse to the aesthetics of St. Thomas of Aquinas has a restriction: When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal experience (P 209). The notorious letters Joyce wrote to Nora in December 1909 record that new, intersubjective experience, linking the act of writing to the drive, while marking a significant in Joyce's aesthetic development.' If we understand an event as a moment indicating an irreversible change, we may see these letters as the beginning of the incremental movement in Joyce's fiction away from mimesis to an ever more performative and rhythmic style in which the act of writing overrides the desire to create a transparent copy of real life. Samuel Beckett notes, [Joyce's] writing is not about something; it is that something itself.2 The movement towards enactment instead of representation, which Beckett sees as characteristic of Joyce's writing in Finnegans Wake, had its beginnings in Joyce's correspondence with Nora. That the Nora letters are highly performative is obvious. Written to sustain the onanistic complicity between husband and wife (SL xxiv), they feature the characteristics of performative speech. They use the present tense, and they comment on the activity of reading and writing, as well as on the relationship between reading and masturbating: Darling, I came off just now in my trousers so that I am utterly played out. I cannot go to the G.P.O. though I have three letters to post (SL 190); [Y]our letter was lying in front of me and my eyes were fixed, as they are even now, on a certain word in it. There is something obscene and lecherous in the very look of the letters. The sound of it too is like the act itself, brief, brutal, irresistible and devilish (SL 180). Representing a process of increasing fetishization, the letters stand in for the absent body of the beloved. The tangibility of the paper,

This essay examines James Joyce’s creative engagement with Latin and its connection to Luc Deitz’s philological scholarship, notably his edition of Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem. Joyce’s Jesuit education provided a strong foundation in Latin, shaping his linguistic sensibility and aesthetic theory. Across A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, Latin appears in liturgical phrases, scholastic terminology, Dog Latin, and complex syntactic play, serving as a cultural marker and a tool for humor and modernist experimentation. The study highlights Joyce’s dialogue with Aristotle, whose concepts of tragedy, catharsis, and aesthetic stasis inform his work. This engagement is contrasted with Scaliger’s nuanced reception of Aristotle, which Deitz demonstrates to be far less dependent on Aristotelian doctrine than assumed. Ultimately, Joyce revitalizes Latin to articulate radical modernist forms, affirming the enduring relevance of classical languages and humanistic scholarship—a conviction central to Deitz’s work.

James Joyce's near blindness, his peculiar gait, and his death from perforated ulcers are commonplace knowledge to most of his readers. But until now, most Joyce scholars have not recognized that these symptoms point to a diagnosis of syphilis. Kathleen Ferris traces Joyce's medical history as described in his correspondence, in the diaries of his brother Stanislaus, and in the memoirs of his acquaintances, to show that many of his symptoms match those of tabes dorsalis, a form of neurosyphilis which, untreated, eventually leads to paralysis. Combining literary analysis and medical detection, Ferris builds a convincing case that this dread disease is the subject of much of Joyce's autobiographical writing. Many of this characters, most notably Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, exhibit the same symptoms as their creator: stiffness of gait, digestive problems, hallucinations, and impaired vision. Ferris also demonstrates that the themes of sin, guilt, and retribution so prevalent in Joyce's works are almost certainly a consequence of his having contracted venereal disease as a young man while frequenting the brothels of Dublin and Paris. By tracing the images, puns, and metaphors in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and by demonstrating their relationship to Joyce's experiences, Ferris shows the extent to which, for Joyce, art did indeed mirror life.