Abstracts

Duygu Serdaroğlu

“This is Dyoublong”: The Doubling Characters in “A Little Cloud” and “Clay”

This paper studies public and private self-doubling in James Joyce’s Dubliners, focusing on the characters Little Chandler in “A Little Cloud” and Maria in “Clay”, that is, while Little Chandler is seen as a responsible yet shy and invisible clerk in public, it is revealed that he is frustrated with his unfulfilled ambitions, and longing for freedom, publicised through his admiration for his friend, Gallaher. Similarly, Maria is a cheerful and dutiful unmarried woman, however, she is imprisoned in and surrounded by loneliness, repression, and misjudged desires. The stories meet on the same ground in terms of the similarities in doubling: the private self exposes internal conflict, unfulfilled desires, and the limitations inflicted by Dublin society, accentuating Joyce’s theme of paralysis. The gendered difference, however, lies in expression and agency since while Little Chandler unmasks his tension through fantasy and emotional frustration, an outcome of the pressures of his masculine ambition, Maria supresses hers, controlled by social expectations and domestic roles, reflecting feminine passivity. Thus, both characters resonate each other in depicting both how public and private selves function as a means to examine identity crises and the distinct societal pressures that (re)shape male and female experiences in early twentieth-century Dublin. Hence, the aim of this study is to analyse Little Chandler in “A Little Cloud” and Maria in “Clay” as doubling characters by focusing on the clash between their private and public selves although the way of their expose differs due to the gender difference.

Hawk Chang

Doubling of James Joyce’s Dubliners in Pai Hsien-Yung’s Taipei People

James Joyce has a universal impact on world literature. His depiction of the spiritual paralysis typical of 20th-century Irish people marks a pivotal legacy, beckoning writers in other cultural contexts to replicate and reinvent their similar yet distinct, paralyzed homelands. Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People (1971) is a collection of 14 stories delineating the lives of Mainland Chinese migrants who fled to Taiwan during and after the Chinese Civil War in the 1920s-40s. Consequently, Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) not only finds its doubles in European cities, such as Zurich, Trieste, Paris, and Krakow, but also reemerges in Taipei through Pai’s imaginary recreation. Both collections are swarming with people’s sense of loss, despair, frustration, and frailty in their attempts to seek meaning. Recurring failures drive them to aspire to escape from earthly troubles, echoing Tuan Yi-fu’s proposition that escapism is a universal desire. However, despite their similarities, Taipei People differs from Dubliners in significant ways. Unlike Joyce’s stories that focus on characters from all walks of life, Taipei People features the lives of aristocrats and their regret for bygone glories due to their enforced migration from China to Taiwan. By reading Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People as a double of Joyce’s Dubliners, this paper examines escapism in both texts to better understand how Pai’s stories both continue and deviate from Joyce’s writing and the implications. 

Sofiia Koptiukh

“By the lighted dial of a clock”: Anachronism in Dubliners as a Contradiction Within Modernity?

Traditional readings of Dubliners have placed great emphasis on the category of paralysis and framed the short stories as critiques of Irish stagnation and immobility. The challenges posed by critics such as Kevin J. H. Dettmar and David Ben-Merre to the epiphany/paralysis paradigm since the 90s prompt questions about the way the stories are informed by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses of progress and linear, teleological historical development beyond these categories. This paper argues that anachronistic parody and pastiche of outdated or declining literary forms are key devices used in Dubliners to both represent and undermine what Walter Benjamin referred to as the “empty, homogenous time” of modernity: a linear temporality characterised by constant progress on one hand and an unbroken equivalence of each moment with the next on the other. Focusing on Araby as an example and drawing on Franco Moretti’s research on the Bildungsroman, I intend to show that the story connects the boy’s journey to both his coming of age and the Enlightenment as the metaphorical “coming of age” of humanity, ostensibly portraying a transition from a magical, medieval worldview to a modern, disenchanted perspective. At the same time, the form of the chivalric romance functions not just as an archaic aspect to overcome but as a continuous anachronistic presence that undermines the novelty of the transition and implies the possibility of multiple overlapping forms of temporality. 

Anne Marie D’Arcy

Surveying ‘A Ponderous Saxon’ (U. 1.50): The Double Character of Haines’ English Signals

The character of Haines in Ulysses has long been identified with Richard Samuel Dermot Chenevix Trench (1881-1909). There are several strong, surface parallels, most notably his Oxford education, interest in the Gaelic Revival, and his residence in the Martello tower at Sandycove during Joyce’s brief sojourn there (9-15 September 1904). However, this identification is problematic, as pointed out by Padraic Colum and Con Curran, ‘I can in no way recognise him in the Haines of Ulysses and he should not be so identified with him.’ This paper argues that in the manner of several significant characters in Ulysses, Haines is a composite figure. Haines’ interest in the Gaelic Revival recalls Dermot Trench’s enthusiasm for Irish literature, language, and folklore, if not his interest in Irish nationalism. Yet we also find echoes of the linguistic legacy of his grandfather, Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–86), in Haines’ philological obsessions. However, an entirely different inspiration dictates Joyce’s choice of name: that of Charles Edward Haynes, Lt. Col. RE CRE DLD, who not only surveyed and mapped the Martello Tower and Battery at Sandycove, but signed the lease with Oliver St John Gogarty on behalf of ‘secretary of state for war’ (U 1.540), 24 June 1904. Moreover, Haynes, or Haines, as his name was spelled in despatches, was known to an Irish audience even before he became Superintendent of the Ordinance Survey, Irish Division. He was a cup-final, association footballer, who served as a lieutenant in the 2nd Field Company, Royal Engineers during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. He famously used a cracked, hand-held, shaving mirror in lieu of a heliograph to help relieve the two-month Siege of Eshowe, broken on 3 April 1879. This paper will demonstrate how Joyce’s knowledge of the historical Haynes not only informs the narrative in ‘Telemachus’, but also at certain later points in the text.

Krisztina Rákóczy, Anna Pomozi

Echoes of Old English Literature in Joyce’s Poetic Novels

Connections between Joyce’s works and Old English texts, though occasionally studied, have received significantly less critical attention than their links to other literary traditions. Scholarly consensus has maintained until recently that Joyce’s sources for his Anglo-Saxon or ‘Anglo-‍Oxen’ have been confined to George Saintsbury’s 1912 A History of English Prose and Rhythm (Wales 1989) and Thomas Arnold’s 1862 A Manual of English Literature (Pierce 2006). Finding it likely that Joyce read more Old English verse than scholarly criticism generally gives him credit for, this paper presents the beginning of a systematic enquiry into the meshwork of allusions between Joyce’s oeuvre and the Old English canon. While Finnegans Wake will be at its centre, the study extends into Joyce’s other novels as it explores the medieval connotations manifest in the texts. It is possible to view Joyce as a medievalist author, and in reading him so, ‘the medieval is imaginatively retheorised as being present within the present’ (Green 2021). Besides a reimagined past prevailing in the present, however, we find a commonality of place and topic. The unclean waters of Grendel’s mere, ‘flod under foldan’ and the ‘turf coloured bogwater’ in A Portrait evoke the same damp, narrow hell. The ‘dygel lond / warigeað wulfhleoþu windige næssas’ and ‘the slow weedy waterway’ of ‘Hades’ with ‘beds of reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs’ use the same stylistic devices for the same ends. The Wake’s Earwickers suggest a possible analogy with Wulf and Eadwacer. Furthermore, alliterative verse is frequently lodged in prose along with Joyce’s kenning-like coinages. Through exploring these correspondences and more, the study aims to enhance our understanding of Joyce’s use of Anglo-Saxon.

Henry Chen

Benchmarking Non-Gabler Editions of Ulysses Using a Corrected Version of Arion Press

Abstract: The 1988 Arion Press Ulysses is a great feat of bookmaking: luxurious, with handset type and thought-provoking illustrations. More interesting for Joyceans is that the text was originally edited by John Kidd, with David Hayman participating later. Their goal was to create the best text attested by major pre-Gabler variants. Sadly, after a dispute with the publisher, Kidd was removed from the project, and the text corrupted by improper readings and outright errors. However, by comparing the Arion text with my collation of Ulysses textual variants, as well as consulting with Kidd himself, I have been able to recover a text that comes close to Kidd and Hayman’s vision.

My talk will discuss the two main benefits of studying this benchmark of pre-Gabler editions. First, while the Gabler Ulysses dominates the academic market, there are many current editions based on pre-Gabler versions. For example, both Oxford and Cambridge have annotated editions based on Shakespeare and Company 1922, Alma uses Odyssey Press 1939, and many editions released in the centennial year of publication are based on Bodley Head 1960. By comparing these and other texts to the benchmark, we can assess their relative accuracy. Odyssey Press is the clear winner.

The second benefit of the benchmark is to establish the limits of correcting the Ulysses text using only published versions. The Gabler edition was the first to base its readings largely on pre-publication materials. This was followed by Danis Rose’s Folio 2017. By comparing the Arion-based benchmark to Gabler and Rose, we can see just now necessary pre-publication analysis is to establishing an accurate Ulysses text. Kidd himself said Arion corrected about 900 errors in Random House 1961. In contrast, there are almost 5000 differences from Gabler and almost 2500 from Rose.

Onno Kosters

In Other Worlds: Translation as Annotation?  

The principal questions concerning how and what to annotate in Joyce are continuously problematised by time: the further removed from turn of the 20^th-century Dublin and environs we become, the more glosses we (seem to) need. The culture-bound items (“realia”) of Joyce’s works and worlds are a specific case in point. Over time, simply understanding what many of them refer to, let alone being able to assess their weight in Joyce’s “collideorescape” (FW 143.28), has become increasingly difficult without recourse to extra- or paratextual resources.

For translators, there are ways to annotate-while-translate intratextually as a means to navigate source text realia. “They passed under the hugecloaked Liberator’s form” (U 6.249) might become (backtranslated from the target language) something like “They passed under Daniel O’Connell’s, the hugecloaked Liberator’s form [or even: statue].” Is it possible to do so, however, without sacrificing target text accessibility or destroying Joycean ‘literariness’. And if it is possible, is it desirable to do so? Using various models suggested by key translation scholars (Holmes, Berman, Nord, others), this paper investigates a number of recent and older (re)translations of Ulysses to see which strategies have been, might have been, or should perhaps not have been employed to bring Joyce’s realia across: across the threshold of one language to another, changing everything while at the same time reshaping the text world in other – or potentially the same – words.

Natalia Kamovnikova

Ulysses in the Soviet Union: Adoration and Aberration

Despite its perils on both sides of the Atlantic, Ulysses immediately received a hearty welcome in the Soviet Union, Russian becoming the second language into which excerpts of the novel were translated. Enthusiastic about experimentation, the Russian artistic community from Evgenii Zamiatin to Sergei Eisenstein embraced the novel with excitement. However, five Russian attempts at translating Ulysses into Russian in the 1920s–1930s took place against the backdrop of intensifying political repression in the country, which had a global impact on the literary community. The number of violent deaths among the translators and editors of Ulysses, which had been by then officially denounced by the Soviet literary mainstream, reached such a scale that it gave rise to rumours that the novel brought death to all who worked on it. Strangely, these rumours remain alive to this day, almost a century after they first arose. In light of the upcoming publication of my monograph The Fearful Steelpen: Russian Translations of “Ulysses,” 1920–1930s by the University of Massachusetts Press in autumn 2026, I am going to dwell on the reasons for the daring translation feats and the unrelenting fears of the novel. In addition to the very real reasons for this dichotomy, I will also focus on the irrational ones: those that interested Freud and Jung and instilled superstitious fear in the Soviet leadership, which saw Ulysses as a real threat to its power.

Gregory Moynahan

“… that we may tell of the seven peoples who took Ireland before them”: The Book of Invasions of Ireland, Deep History, and Archival Silence in Finnegans Wake

If Joyce, following Vico, considered Finnegans Wake a kind of universal history, he also considered it, following his other guide, Bruno, to be a partial form of knowledge within an infinite whole. It may be in this sense that he once compared history to the children’s game of telephone. In this talk, I consider how Irish historical source materials used by Joyce reflect this epistemic model, and what this suggests about the nature of history in Finnegans Wake. Consider the beginning of the eleventh-century Book of Invasions of Ireland (Lebor Gabála Érenn), which presents the origin of the Gaedil people and their creation of the Gaelic language as they leave Scythia and find a new homeland in Ireland. Then the text abruptly shifts: “Let us cease from the stories of the Gaedil, that we may tell of the seven peoples who took Ireland before them.” Even as Lebor Gabála forces this widening narrative into a Christian chronology, it also gestures towards a deeper past that exceeds stable narration. Consider the first invasion to enter the historical record, the Roman encounter with insular Druidism, where a handful of hostile secondary Roman and Christian accounts stand against the total archival silence of the Druids themselves. Using historians Joyce referenced, such as R. A. S. Macalister, as well as theorists of history such as Ankersmit, Trouillot, and Smail, I hope to suggest not only how Irish historical sources influenced Joyce, but also what in turn Finnegans Wake can teach historians about reading these sources.

John O’Connell

Skibbereen and Joyce: 2 Bs or Not 2 Bs?

This paper examines James Joyce’s engagement with Skibbereen through a seemingly minor but revealing detail: the spelling and recurrence of the town’s name across his works. While Skibbereen appears only twice in Ulysses and four times in Finnegans Wake, these sparse references prove genetically and interpretively rich.

Focusing on the orthographic instability of “Skibbereen”, including Joyce’s occasional one-b variants, the paper traces the evolution of each occurrence from notebook through proofs and post-1922 editions, drawing on the James Joyce Digital Archive and manuscript materials. Particular attention is paid to the phrase “the Skibbereen father” (U16.666), which originates in a notebook entry reading “Skibereen father’s blessing,” and later reappears in Joyce’s correspondence (LIII.428) in the form “the skippereen father gives her his blessing,” in reference to the forthcoming Finnegans Wake.

The paper also situates Joyce’s Skibbereen references in relation to the town’s cultural and historical notoriety, explicating those allusions in Ulysses that correspond to the reasons Skibbereen is famous — particularly its associations with famine memory and nationalist history. The latter stems mainly from “The Skibbereen Eagle” reference at U7.735.

The study interrogates the origins of the “father’s blessing” motif. While the Eumaeus episode alludes to the ballad “Dear Old Skibbereen,” extant versions of the song contain no such blessing. This raises the possibility that Joyce was drawing on a now-obscure variant, conflating multiple sources, or deliberately introducing a pseudo-folk element to enrich the Wakean echo chamber of voices.

By combining genetic criticism, textual bibliography, and cultural history, this paper argues that Joyce’s handling of “Skibbereen” exemplifies his method of transforming local Irish material into polyvalent textual nodes, showing how even a marginal place-name can open onto broader questions of memory, transmission, and textual instability.

Marian Eide

Troubling, Doubling Conscience

James Joyce closes Portrait with his protagonist’s ambitious aesthetic, ethical and political project: “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (P 224). It is a bold claim, and by the time Stephen walks out of the pages of Ulysses— hungover, dissolute, destitute, and disillusioned—that conviction seems to have faded in the face of personal and financial challenges. Given the young artist’s apparent lack of conscience, readers might wonder if the ethical project eroded in the time between the two texts, and if Joyce’s “mean realism” merely documents the moral failings and ethical conundrums that haunt the lives of Dubliners. I will argue, on the contrary, that the ethical focus does not fade either for Stephen or for his author. Rather, Joyce doubles down on conscience in part by troubling its double meaning. The common use of “conscience” signifies an internal guideline for right action constituted by an individual sense of the moral good. However, Stephen’s claim is explicitly collective (“my race”) and cleaves more closely to the etymological sense of the word (con or ‘with’ and scire or ‘know’), thus echoing one of his major influences, Thomas Aquinas, whose theology explores the Latin cum alio scientia or knowledge with another. Joyce’s ethic requires that one join thoughts with others, a form of knowing that is both necessary and impossible, as an other’s mind is both unknowably opaque and potentially iniquitous.

Adam Kerker

“Doublejoynted” Conversations: The Dialogical Ethics of Finnegans Wake

Taking Finnegans Wake’s comic dialoguesas jumping-off points for exploring a possible Joycean theory of ethics having at its center the aim of creating the as-of-yet uncreated conscience of the Irish race, I will concentrate on the moments in the Wake when Joyce seeks to depict the fractured relationship of the brothers Shem and Shaun, literary artist and deliverer or publisher of art respectively, always to some extent at odds, by making use of doubles for these characters who attempt, but fail, to engage one another in fruitful conversation. What I will seek to further develop in extending Marian Eide’s work in Ethical Joyce is the connection between an aesthetics adopting as its key symbol the smithy of the soul and an ethics given its content through the interaction of individual souls who, confused, hardly know themselves and how they relate to others. To draw the connecting line between the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Joyce’s project, I limit myself to the dialogue of Mutt and Jute in the first chapter of the Wake.While this pair, doubles of Shem and Shaun, dramatizes the originary encounter of the Irish with their Jute invaders, the true import of their dialogue for Joyce studies lies, I contend, in the dialogue form itself. It testifies to the difficulty of completing a project committed to the act of creating a conscience when the subject in possession of it cannot understand how to act in the presence of others or speak meaningfully to them.

Pearse McCaughey

“After the Race”: 1903 perspective

This paper reassesses “After the Race” as one of Joyce’s most politically revealing early
stories, arguing that its treatment of the 1903 Gordon Bennett Cup Race exposes Dublin as a
city caught between doubled identities: colonial host and aspiring capital, passive spectator
and opportunistic participant, provincial margin and European stage. While the story has
often been dismissed as one of the weaker pieces in Dubliners, this paper situates it within
the charged civic atmosphere of July 1903, when the motor race, the royal visit of Edward
VII, the death of Pope Leo XIII, and the approaching Emmet centenary converged to unsettle
Dublin’s political and cultural self-image.
The paper argues that Joyce’s depiction of Jimmy Doyle and his Continental companions
registers the seductive power of speed, money, and cosmopolitan display, while also
exposing the deeper inequalities that structure Ireland’s encounter with international capital.
Jimmy’s desire to belong among the British, French, German, Hungarian and American
figures around him becomes a drama of doubling: he imitates European modernity while
remaining subordinate to it. Against this compromised figure, Villona, the Hungarian poet,
offers a more suggestive double, one linked to Arthur Griffith’s Hungarian model of national
self-reliance and to the possibility of an alternative political dawn.
Reading “After the Race” through the historical moment of 1903, this paper challenges the
critical tendency to treat the story as awkward or politically inert. Instead, it presents the story
as a subtle diagnosis of economic dependency, social aspiration, and colonial complicity, and
as an early instance of Joyce’s larger effort to reimagine Dublin not as paralysed, but as
divided, performative, and dangerously alive to modernity

Katarzyna Biela

Claire-Louise Bennett as Joyce’s 21st-century quasi-double: a dive into correspondences between their works

The goal of this paper is to outline the correspondences between the prose of James Joyce and that of the contemporary, Ireland-based writer, Claire-Louise Bennett. Bennett’s craft inherits significantly from the previous century and, as regards Joyce specifically, she appears to be inspired both by his thematic preoccupations and stylistic innovations. Apart from this, the two share one more intriguing characteristics: an urge to introduce novelty into literature. Hence, Bennett may be viewed as Joyce’s 21st-century quasi-double: someone who takes after his strategies, yet revises them for her own feminine purposes, suited to the contemporary reality. Daniel Weston (2024) reveals initial correspondences between these two authors: he sees allusions to modernist epiphanies in Bennett’s prose and takes note of her shrewd choice to finish her second novel with a female monologue that prompts associations with Molly Bloom’s. In this paper I would like to take up his suggestion that the comparison of Joyce and Bennett is a fruitful space for discovering connections between modernist and contemporary literature, so as to expand on the potential links. My aim is to elaborate on Weston’s findings and propose further similarities between the two authors: related to their interest in the coming-of-age and Kunstlerroman genres and their aesthetics of quotidianity (or, as Woolf put it, “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day”). I will also pay attention to their densely intertextual compositions, resulting in the layering of various plot threads. In effect, I would like to show Bennett as a writer who blends novelty with nostalgia by both proving to be a major contemporary voice and nodding to the previous century. Joyce, in turn, unexpectedly perhaps, will be seen as continuously influential.

Adrian Paterson

Burning roof and tower: Yeats reading Ulysses

‘I do not know whether Joyce’s Ulysses is a great work of literature. I have puzzled a great deal over that question’, said WB Yeats to Seanad Éireann during a debate about copyright protection. Though hardly doubles, Yeats and Joyce are a curiously involved pair. This paper considers Yeats’s puzzled, agonized, but finally fertile readings of Joyce’s novel, his return to Ireland smuggling the book and how he and his wife’s double reading of it affected his work. Three years ago I gave a paper entitled ‘Yeats’s Ulysses’ to the IJJF conference in Dublin, uncovering how Yeats’s presence in Ulysses represents an complex debt Joyce paid to the elder writer, as Stephen Dedalus’s recalls and replayings of Yeats’s early lyrics inaugurate new narrative techniques. This paper considers such redoubled exchanges more from the other side, uncovering the effect of such lyric recyclings, narrative disorientings and historical and philosophical connections on an elder writer immersed in writing new poems for The Tower. The revised early chapters of a novel published 2 February 1922, the day before Yeats’s father died in New York, Yeats encountered in great excitement in two places: Dublin, changing his view of the city, and sequestered at the square tower of Thoor Ballylee, Galway, as Civil War raged. This in part explained his martial response, comparing its tone to that of a rebel sergeant in 1798, but also the explosive effect of the form and matter on his new poetry. Joyce’s book paid anachronistic homage to a shared history, both their past and continued connection, encouraging Yeats’s poems in autobiographical playing; the use of “metempsychosis” resonated with a poet in touch with instructing spirits and conjuring ghost doubles; common sources in the understanding of memory and history in Blake and Boehme were revisited, alongside theories of perception in Bergson and Berkeley; while doubled characters, narratives, and the overlain periods of the ‘mythical method’ combined with attention to the sounds of poetry (rhymes and ‘twining stresses, two by two’) to enrich the historical layering and local writing of The Tower. The paper concludes that when Yeats (having barely read half of the book) confessed his painstaking reading of Ulysses and praised Joyce’s ‘heroic mind’ to baffled Irish Senators, these controversial words were no idle gesture, but just the latest of his many significant readings and responses to Ulysses.   

Wit Pietrzak

Paul Muldoon’s adaptations of “The Dead”

The presentation will focus on Paul Muldoon’s two adaptations of Joyce’s “The Dead,” one unpublished manuscript dating from 1984, and one he co-wrote with his wife, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. As the interrelations between Muldoon’s two versions of the short story are traced to the poet’s other engagements with Joyce’s oeuvre, particularly in his To Ireland, I, I will explore the ends to which “The Dead” is put in Muldoon’s renditions, which oscillate around the various deployments of political critique. In effect, I will argue that Joyce’s allusive-elusive text, in Muldoon’s hands, pays increased attention to the central conflicts of modern Irish history.

Skylar Fetter

Transfigurative Female Agency in Joyce’s Natural World

In James Joyce’s Ulysses and A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, the natural environment creates a transformative space for the men to realize their most inner desires. In these scenes, women often play a primary role in moving the narrative forward. This paper enacts an ecofeminist lens to interrogate the ways in which Joyce disrupts a traditional patriarchal and anthropogenic relationship with the environment through the integration of women and the natural world. The ecological realm becomes a pathway to transfiguration and transcendence for both men and women. Stephen and Leopold experience revelation in the presence of women and nature by ascribing meaning onto them, while the women use these spaces to subvert traditional gender expectations. In Joyce’s comparisons to the women as blooming flowers and birds, women, and nature collapse into one. In this joining they are both subjected to the male gaze and yet still discover moments of self-actualization. Gertie becomes seductive and alluring, despite her physical impairments. Molly finds sexual pleasure in her fantasies of the mountains and her memories amongst the flowers with Leopold. The bird girl and her wings suggest ascension while Stephen continually laments his inability to fly. Women assert their femininity for personal gratification in the natural spaces of a larger, primarily male dominated landscape. The women in Joyce’s work offer unique glimpses into how women might assert agency through male prescribed connections to the natural world.

Hou Xiaoshan (Ian Hou)

“General All Over Ireland”: Forecast Generality, Climatic Form, and Routed Time in Joyce’s “The Dead”

This paper rereads the closing paragraph of James Joyce’s “The Dead” as a theory of weather knowledge and mediation rather than a final lyric emblem. The sentence “the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland” introduces a synoptic, forecast-like generality that treats Ireland as legible all at once. Joyce’s prose immediately refracts that verdict: “all over” is redistributed as an itinerary—across plains, bogs, treeless hills, river, and graveyard—so that generality becomes a routed event rather than a completed fact.

I develop the concept of forecast form to describe this conversion of public information into durational exposure. On the one hand, Joyce borrows the administrative idiom of weather reports, aligned with print infrastructures of mapping, scale, and national overview. On the other, the paragraph thickens and delays that idiom through progressive aspect (“was falling”), rhythmic repetition, and cadential drag, transforming a punctual report into lived contact. The line between report and experience becomes unstable: a thin, homogenizing generality is reworked into a sequence of uneven encounters with landscapes marked by extraction, depletion, resistance, and marginal death.

Situating this formal operation within debates on weathering and thick time, the paper argues that Joyce’s snowfall performs a geopoetics of erasure that links places without making them equivalent. Read in the context of Irish colonial modernity—and resonant with other European landscapes shaped by imperial partition and infrastructural re-scaling—“The Dead” offers a model of climatic modernism in which meteorological generality is made to stutter, echo, and reroute, producing a public “all over” that can never fully smooth the ground it covers.

Nina Milonet

“re-peating yourself”: Peat as an Archive and a Prophecy

This paper will examine peat as a literal object and as a metaphor in James Joyce’s work by drawing from ecocriticism and recent research in energy readings of Joyce’s work. Peatlands are key natural features of Ireland: on top of being a powerful and historical source of energy, they are also an enlightening record of the past. This double purpose of peat mirrors its double nature. Peat has been described as both a fossil fuel and a renewable source of energy, which makes it a paradoxical object that simultaneously preserves a distant past and powers a near future, one function being undermined by the other. Mentions of this ultra local product in Joyce’s works reframe the relationship between the soil and the discourse that surrounds it. “re-peating yourself” (Finnegans Wake, 397.7-8) therefore becomes a problem and its very solution in a body of work structured on renewal: by reviving fossilised matter, Joyce sheds light on the porous frontiers between life and death, human and non-human, fossil and renewable. I contend that Joyce’s sometimes unusual use of peat helps him rewrite pieces of colonial history while never turning nationalistic. This treatment of peat allows alternative timelines that escape a fixed and linear representation of the cultural norms in Ireland. Joyce’s focus on peat also belongs to a broader consideration for energy sources and fossil fuels in what I will define as a branch of “petromodernism.”

Pooja Bachani

A Pocket Full of Doubles: Objects and Things in Ulysses  

The various inanimate entities in Ulysses exhibit ontological doubling, oscillating between object and thing as they, like Leopold Bloom, make their own peregrinations throughout Dublin. Whereas Bloom moves through the city, the inanimate entities move across the ecosystem of the pockets mirroring the odyssey of their keeper. The microcosmic infrastructure of pockets functions as a miniature double of the city of Dublin in which the inanimate entities move and change position within an inanimate-entity-only ecosystem. As objects, these inanimate entities interact and engage with one another within the folded and layered infrastructure of pockets; as things they interrupt this infrastructure by entering Bloom’s phenomenological field. As things, the inanimate entities also serve as catalysts for affective responses, narrative devices, and, what Vike Martina Plock calls, “agents of intersubjectivity”. An inanimate entity can be an agent of intersubjectivity if it contributes to the process by which characters share meanings, experiences, and understandings. The ontological doubling of inanimate entities is feasible because of their existence within their own ecosystem. Through a close reading of inanimate entities like the handkerchief, and the bar of lemon soap, amongst others, I will analyze their function as objects and things, and illuminate the insights they reveal about the characters and the meaning of Ulysses as a whole. While Bloom’s obsession with materiality in Ulysses has continued to be a steady topic of interest for Joyceans, object and thing theory, coupled with ecology and doubling, presents opportunities for new perspectives that can supplement the existing scholarly conversation.

Patrick Callan

“Etiquette is etiquette” Mourning fashion in Ulysses

In Ulysses, the ordering of the funeral process and its associated customs was not confined to a unitary section such as Hades episode. Joyce sprinkled conversations and observations throughout Ulysses that centred around the rites and mores associated with dying, death and burial in Dublin City. The plethora of references to death customs progressively clarified and confirmed the city’s cultural response to the presence of the dead in its homes, institutions and on its streets.

This paper looks at the prevalence and style of mourning dress adopted by family members and others. Buck Mulligan observes that “Etiquette is etiquette”. Those attending a funeral would be expected to wear black attire, a prospect embraced by Leopold Bloom as culturally-appropriate. This obligation applied only to the funeral obsequies.

After the passing of a family member, Dublin society expected close and distant relations to adopt a series of social conventions relating to their dress. Spouses, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and a wider frame of relatives were expected to adhere to this sartorial code. Even a sceptic such as Stephen Dedalus accepted the ordinal restrictions to wear (or not wear) certain colours for a specific period after his mother’s passing. Fashion in Ulysses confirms and reflects the class divisions within the city: so Dedalus must wear “secondhand breeks”. This obligation placed severe strain on the poor, while well-off widows could avail of high-end fashion shops that provided an exceptional range of mourning accoutrements.

Anxin Zhou

Dual Shop Windows: Cross-cultural Journey of Commodities and Intercultural Continuum in Ulysses

Ulysses depicts Dublin’s diverse shop windows and cross-cultural journey of commodities within them, providing an intriguing double vision of both the city’s local knowledge and the continuum of global culture. This paper proposes to explore these shop window scenes within Ulysses and their dialogue to The Odyssey, to explore double entendre and the global landscape behind them, like how Joyce merges Dublin and Trieste with sausages/polonies and citron through Dlugacz’s window. Within the shop window—functioning as a viewing aperture, a mirror, and even a stage—Joyce portrays how material wonders in shop windows, such as poplin and tea, interact with cultural ideas and historical realities, serves not only as the starting point for the mental wanderings of novel characters like Bloom, but also as a two-way reflection of the global duality, multiplicity, and ambiguity. This allows the characters to perceive distant lands, participate in the construction of the world, renew their thoughts, and create memories. Joyce uses the shop window to reach into other corners of the world, transforming Irish issues into broader themes within a cultural continuum. This may express care for the souls of all people that transcends borders.

Joshua Hren

Dyoublong Wronglings to Dostoyevskian Dupes: The Grand Inquisitors of Finnegans Wake

If some dismissed Dostoevsky as “fantastic, mad even,” Joyce insisted that the “motives he employed in his work, violence and desire, are the very breath of literature . . . though his characters do act extravagantly, madly, almost, still their basis is firm enough underneath . . . ” In the mad, extravagant book of desires that is Finnegans Wake, after HCE dies (“Here endeth chinchinatibus”), the “four avunculusts” appear (says John Gordon) “in on the secret that their established religion is a ‘ruse,’”; these Gospel writers’ doubles “maddened and they morgued and they lungd and they jowld,” preaching “wronglings” to “dodos” and “dupest dupes,” proliferating prohibitions backed by state-sanctioned violence: “. . . whatever one did they said, the fourlings, that on no accounts you were not to. Guns.” Gordon wonders whether (“though I doubt he did”) Joyce “borrowed . . . from the famous ‘Grand Inquisitor’ chapter of The Brothers Karamazov,”; when “the Jukoleon” in whose name they preach returns, he “will be told to die again or go away”—they “speed the bogre’s barque away.” I wish to demonstrate the ways Joyce did “double” Dostoevsky, drawing out crossovers and contrasts between the “Grand Inquisitor’s” cynic manipulations and Joyce’s comic masterpiece.

Shane Lillis

Is that Dog a Belonging? Figures and Forms of the Dog in the “Proteus” Chapter

In this paper I wish to examine the function, echoes, and sources of the figure of the dog in Ulysses. In the ‘Proteus’ chapter, Stephen, ‘poor dogsbody’ as Mulligan called him earlier, encounters the ‘bloated carcass of a dog’ on Sandymount strand and observes the arrival of a curious ‘live dog’, called Tatters, followed by a man and a woman, its masters perhaps, a couple of ‘cocklepickers’. Aware of his own soul by his side, Stephen watches the encounter between the live dog and the canine carcass, and imagines himself, momentarily, inside the living ‘dogskull’ in order to contemplate, in its place, the decomposing likeness: “Here lies poor dogsbody’s body”. Under the dog’s carcass, the image of a coach mired in sand—‘un coche ensablé’, referring to a critic’s description of Théophile Gautier’s prose—emerges from Stephen’s observations of the silt, stoneheaps, shells. In an attempt to understand how Joyce chose to use the dog as a figure intertwined with thoughts on the themes of duality, form, archaeology and language in this text, I will examine the dog’s status as a thing that belongs to another, and as something attached to its double. Alongside an examination of the early drafts of the chapter, I will analyse and compare Joyce’s depiction of the dog with extracts from Balzac (Louis Lambert) on language,Baudelaire (the poem “Une charogne”) and Flaubert (Bouvard et Pécuchet) on form, and also by Czeslaw Milosz (his poem “Road-side Dog”) on memory and history. Cuvier, Lamarck and Darwin haunt the background. The dog, as I will attempt to show, is the figure that unites these themes.  

Peter Quadrino

The Melville Revival and Finnegans Wake

This paper investigates the nexus between two of the most celebrated novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Herman Melville and James Joyce, through the conjunction of the Melville Revival and the composition of Finnegans Wake. Beginning around 1919, the Melville Revival brought a largely neglected writer—dead for three decades—back into the literary public’s consciousness. The discovery and posthumous publication of Billy Budd in 1924 coincided closely with the period during which Joyce was at work on Finnegans Wake.

The Wake contains a number of direct allusions to Melville, particularly to Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. While some of these have been noted by Wake scholars, this paper approaches the Melville–Joyce connection more broadly, considering whether Melville’s revived presence during the early twentieth century may have exerted a wider influence on Joyce’s late writing. In dialogue with existing scholarship, the paper aims to draw new links between Finnegans Wake and Melville’s work.

A central focus will be Melville’s novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, considered as a possible “double” of the Wake as a key comparative case. Long overshadowed by Moby-Dick, Pierre shares with Finnegans Wake a reputation for difficulty, ambiguity, and troubled reception. Through this comparison, themes of revival, belatedness, and interpretive instability come into focus. The paper also ventures beyond Melville’s most famous works to consider the possibility of Joyce’s engagement with lesser-studied texts such as Mardi, Clarel, and Melville’s poetry. Not necessarily an attempt at a definitive account of influence, this paper uses the Melville Revival as a historical lens through which to reconsider Joyce’s engagement with Melville’s work during the composition of Finnegans Wake.

Freddy Conway-Shaw

Freud[ig] and Joyce[ful]: A Doubled Development of Dream as Text

As Richard Ellmann notes, James Joyce was in the habit of remarking to his friends that ‘the name Joyce meant the same thing in English as Freud in German’ (1959: 490). Joyce’s amusement at this coincidence highlights not just the potential for an acknowledged affinity with Sigmund Freud, but implicitly demonstrates Joyce’s interest, à la Freud, in verbal and linguistic patterns and play that can be felt throughout both writers’ oeuvres. Bringing these two figures together is not new: in particular since the publication of Finnegans Wake (1939), scholars have been at pains to locate Freudian roots in Joyce’s text(s). Yet this paper takes its cue from what it hopes to term a ‘theoretical turn’ in Joyce studies, in wake of Gabriel Renggli (2023) and Katherine Franco (2024).

It views Joyce as a dream theorist alongside Freud rather than as a literary writer inspired by (or departing from) psychoanalytical thought. Beginning in the minutiae of Finnegans Wake’s language—departing from the unimaginably innocuous ‘strame’ (104.10) of 1.5—this paper argues that within Joyce’s novel he theorises a textual paradigm of dreaming that can be read as a double of Freudian developments. In so doing, I aim to historicise textual dreaming as a theoretical development of the early twentieth century that, perhaps almost uncannily, these two thinkers elaborated alongside each other.

Bridget O’Rourke, James Shaw

Twin Adjacencies

In Finnegans Wake, doubling functions as both structural principle and spiritual method. Building on our earlier work, “The Yoga of Finnegans Wake” (2016; Hypermedia Joyce), this paper extends our inquiry into Joyce’s dialogue with Tantric and Yogic thought, where opposites are not mere binaries but energetic complements expressing the underlying union of East-West, masculine-feminine, Shiva-Shakti, HCE-ALP.

The East and the West, so Joyce writes on page 597 of the Wake:

there are two signs to turn
to, the yest and the ist, the wright side and the wronged side,
feeling aslip and wauking up, so an, so farth. Why? On the sourd-
site we have the Moskiosk Djinpalast with its twin adjacencies,

the bathouse and the bazaar…

We will explore this twinning, focusing on the Sanskrit references on pages 596–597 and elsewhere in the Wake. We argue that Joyce points specifically to Tantric Yoga, which Wendy Doniger describes as the union—twinning—of opposites: bhukti–mukti, “enjoyment–release,” “sensual delight and spiritual flight.” In this frame, samsara (the cycle of birth and death) is not opposed to but one with nirvana (spiritual liberation).

There are several references to the great Hindu God Shiva on these pages including a pointed pun, in Sanskrit, “vidnis Shavarsanjivana” which suggests Shiva (Shaiva) sleeping (Sha, as in the final resting pose common in Yoga classes, shavasana) or as a corpse/sleeper awakening as the essential universe-pervading Self (sanjivana or jivatma). The “sleeper awakening” (FW 597/26).

This flow of oppositions, this vibration, is essential to both Tantra and The Wake.

Daniel Esmonde Deasy

Flying by the Nets of Time in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

This paper—which is co-authored with Luca Crispi, University College Dublin—has two main aims. The first is to highlight the notable ways in which James Joyce “flies by the net of time” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), both at the “local” level, by largely omitting from the narrative the precise times and dates at which events take place, their durations, and the temporal relations between them; and, at the “global” level, by omitting both the calendar years over which the narrative extends and the absolute and relative durations of significant temporal parts of Stephen Dedalus’ life (such as the duration of his studies in University College). Our second goal is to provide a theoretical framework which can be used to explain how Joyce achieves a deep sense of temporality in A Portrait, despite its lack of chronological specificity and imprecise temporal sequencing. To do this, we draw on theories from the philosophy of time and phenomenology—especially those of Edmund Husserl, J. M. E. McTaggart and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—to conceptualise Joyce’s treatment of time in A Portrait. We argue that because conscious experience is essentially temporally structured, the fact that Stephen’s experience saturates the narrative voice of A Portrait provides the novel with an unavoidable temporality for the reader. This explains why the “temporal haze” of A Portrait—the lack of objective temporal markers, the temporal gaps in the narrative, the temporal discontinuities, and the inconsistent representation of the rate of the passage of time—does not disrupt the reader’s sense of the narrative as temporally ordered and continuous, and presumably why the issue of chronological time in A Portrait did arise as a narratological problem for many decades.

Damon Franke

The Qualitative Multiplicity of Joyce’s Use of Adverbs

In “The Qualitative Multiplicity of Joyce’s Use of Adverbs,” I develop my ongoing work on the philosophy of becoming  in Joyce’s works through close analysis of one of his signature techniques.  My presentation will have handouts delineating specific passages under examination and should readily elicit commentary from the audience.  In part, the adverbs in Ulysses underwrite Bergsonian themes of time and change in the novel serving to modify action verbs with a descriptive quality.  The semiotic influence wielded at times by the adverbs on narrative action registers a sense of becoming akin to Bergson’s sense of qualitative multiplicity within duration.  The double use of adverbs in “Ithaca” particularly evoke this multiplicity, as the interpenetrating adverbial hendiadys microcosmically parallel the dialectical synthesis governing the episode.  While my presentation will address (in passing) Joyce’s common use of adverbs to denote how things are said or to describe simple movement, the focus will be on adverbial use that conveys ontological shifts or dynamism in states of matter.  For example, “white forms and fragments streaming by mutely” describes the vision of poplars as the funeral procession arrives at Glasnevin in “Hades.” The forms stream “mutely” yet sustain “vain gestures” in a statement on language and epistemology.  A silence becomes expressive and yet empty, as do the ensuant memories in the cemetery.

Riley Moore

Nietzsche in Dublin: The Making of Joyce’s Double

This paper argues that Stephen Dedalus’s religious transformation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses unfolds as a drama of doubling. The doubling operates on two levels. On one level, Stephen mirrors Joyce himself, standing as a fictional counterpart to the author’s break with Catholicism. On another, Stephen’s unbelief operates as a doubling—or mirroring—of his prior religious belief. That is, though Stephen rejects Catholicism, he does not reject its structure. The intensity, discipline, and moral seriousness of faith remain, but redirected toward artistic self-creation. Portrait operates as a reverse Confessions: where Saint Augustine moves toward God, Stephen moves away.

I draw heavily on Richard Ellmann’s account of Joyce’s break with Catholicism, and on Joyce’s early engagement with Friedrich Nietzsche, to build this paper. Nietzsche’s critique of morality, moreover, and his figure of the Übermensch clarify what stands on the far side of belief: not simple unbelief, but a new standard of value, one forged from what Nietzsche calls “the re-valuation of all values.”

Stephen’s refusal to kneel at his mother’s deathbed in Ulysses captures both doublings; Joyce himself refused to kneel beside his mother’s deathbed; and Stephen’s opposition is not straightforwardly atheistic, for his refusal is as dogmatic as his previous religious convictions. That opposition becomes emblematic of a larger pattern—moments in which religious inheritance is neither preserved nor erased, but mirrored and reversed. Other moments in both novels show the same pattern at work.

Anne Ciecko

Joyce and Videopoetic Doublings

Vital interartistic/intermedial and historical dimensions of James Joyce’s Modernist works are explored through the concept of ‘cinematicity’ by Keith Williams, in his important study, James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film (2020), in dialogue with scholars such as Errki Huhtamo (2013) on the ‘media-cultural imaginary’ and proto-cinematic phenomena. This presentation extends the exploration of cinematicity with a genealogical perspective on the emergence of analog and digital video as vehicles for composite, layered, hybrid, transdiscursive and transnational/transcultural videopoetic practices that can be described as Joycean, and that also offer lenses on Joyce’s work. In terms of material culture, the movie theater Joyce attempted to establish in Dublin in 1909, while living as a young English teacher in Trieste (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), stopped operations in 1910; however, its name has become incorporated into the branded legacy appeal of small-nation-with-global-impact cinema in the portfolio of one of Ireland’s leading film and video-on-demand distributors. The ‘video turn’ in contemporary global media culture (where much of what we call cinema is also, concurrently, digital media, or at least reliant on the digital to realize its cinematicity) is not just a mutation from what came before. Employing an array of media/film/literary/cultural theories and videopoetic manifestos, this presentation illustrates Joycean prolepsis that anticipates and embodies newer forms of media. This presentation concludes with the screening of two short original Joyce-themed videopoems, Eala (Swan/Łabędź) and One Hundred Years (Céad Bliain/Cent’anni/Sto lat ) researched/written/directed/filmed/animated by the presenter, an interdisciplinary scholar and videopoet of Polish heritage.

Adam Gee

Strickly Forbidden: filming the unfilmable novel 

Karl Radek, writer, revolutionary and Soviet Communist leader, was a passenger on Lenin’s famous sealed train from Zurich to St Petersburg, and a denigrator of the Easter Rising. He also virulently denounced Joyce at the 1st International Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow in August 1934, calling his work a “pile of shit”. Pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein tried to counter his vicious attack on Joyce but to limited effect. He had read and greatly admired Ulysses in 1928, inspired by the interior monologue techniques.  He went on to meet Joyce in Paris in 1930. Joyce considered Eisenstein one of only two directors capable of realising the film of Ulysses. In due course the film was eventually made by Joseph Strick, the American son of a Polish Jew. Eisenstein / Strick is the core double.

This paper springboards from the Radek-Eisenstein clash to explore what Strick brought to the film when the book was finally adapted (another double) in 1967, in particular how his Jewish background influenced his vision for/creative approach to the movie, and his relations with cast, crew and others involved in the production. Also how it affected his view of Ireland, including what positives emerged from doubling 1904 Dublin with the 1967 city.

The final doubling is the question of casting. With an English actress as Molly and a Scot as Stephen (plus both scriptwriters being American – Oscar nominated for the film) to what degree was the movie bound to be a cosmopolitan affair and how did the rich mix of perspectives add to the end result? Strick’s directing deliberately gave great sway to the actors’ ideas, many of which were incorporated  in the final cut.

This paper draws on Strick’s archives which are mainly at the Academy Film Archive in Hollywood (part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Foundation), as well as in the RTÉ Archives and the National Archives, Ireland.

Luc Gerard

“He saw himself…”: Interiority in James Joyce’s and John Huston’s The Dead

This paper compares the representation of interiority in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” with its 1987 film adaption, centring on an exploration of how director John Huston negotiates the problem of adapting a prose text written in free indirect style to an audiovisual medium. In prose, Joyce represented, not only direct access to the thoughts of any given individual character or group, but also particular ways of seeing the world. Film – a medium which can only represent the exteriors of actors playing characters – is a medium which comparatively lacks convenient methods of representing both thought and perception. This paper shows how Huston, far from trying to replicate Joyce’s style (as in 2003’s Bloom), nor simply retelling the plot and action of Joyce’s narrative, rather uses film technique to, at times subtly, and at others more explicitly, render various facets of character interiority. Deprivileging Gabriel’s perspective, sacrificing Joyce’s depth in portraying one central consciousness, Huston’s adaptation takes a broader interest in social moods and shared emotion (which forms part of why the cinematography favours group shots), while also providing occasional windows into specific feeling. This paper also develops a comparison with Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993). This analogous adaptation of an early 20th century prose text, with elements of social satire and romantic tragedy, does successfully translate free indirect style to the audiovisual medium of film, and thereby forms a helpful analogue to understand the unique combination of opacity and psychological depth achieved in Huston’s The Dead.

Casey Drosehn Gough

Doubling Stephen’s Shakespeare Theory: Adaptation as Interpretive Method

In her 2019 article “Riffing on Shakespeare,” Irina Rasmussen argues that Stephen’s Shakespeare theory “tests a new model of literary creativity” and, in so doing, registers the impact of the broader post-war avant-garde zeitgeist, in particular its “premise that modern art and life are one” (33–34). But Stephen’s delivery of his unorthodox view, calculated to provoke his audience, is also a moment in which literary invention converges with literary scholarship. With good reason, we tend to treat these activities as separate: scholarly research is usually understood as distinct from any inventive or creative writing one might also pursue. In this paper, however, I argue that “doubling” Ulysses itself, i.e. creatively resituating the novel in the present, can not only inform scholarship but also demonstrate how Joyce’s narrative methods may be used to highlight contemporary social problems. Drawing on Dryden’s notion of “libertine translation,” viz. the “[e]ndeavour of a later Poet to write like one who has written before him on the same Subject… to set him as a Patern, and to write, as he supposes, that Authour would have done, had he liv’d in our Age, and in our Country,” I first describe my own “libertine translation” of Stephen’s Shakespeare theory. I then explain how the adaptation process might inform contributions to Joyce Studies, as well as how a contemporary “double” of the episode brings into relief asymmetries of power experienced within and beyond academe.

Mohamed Hajjaj 

The Practice of Annotation in Ulysses: Immanence, an Epistemological Limitation, or a Plane of Ideology? 

Four years after the French Revolution of 1848, Charles Baudelaire, briefly influenced by a utilitarian ideal of art,¹ published a short article entitled L’École païenne. In it, he alludes to and ridicules neoclassicists’ materialism, their obsession with form, Greek mimesis, and the doctrine of l’art pour l’art. Most significantly, he attacks the rupture this doctrine creates between art and morality. It was time, Baudelaire declares, for literature “to renew itself in a better atmosphere.” Such a renewal, for him, required a return to reason and logic; for a literature that “refuses to walk hand in hand with science and philosophy is a homicidal and suicidal literature.”²

Although Baudelaire would later grow out of this rigid utilitarian position, his critical essays continue to reflect a strong awareness of the indivisibility of art, morality, and life.

Seventy years after L’École païenne, an Irish author named James Joyce published what he prophesied to be “a kind of encyclopedia”: Ulysses.³ A book reputed for having “skirted [its] age,”⁴ Ulysses engages—through its distinctive lyrical laisser-faire—the question of art and morality by leveling the plane of representation. By literarily and figuratively killing the Cyclopean plane, Joyce forces both characters and readers into an unprecedented mode of parallactic vision: an imagined “East” as imagination, a plane of immanence, and prestigeless heroes.

This paper argues that this plane of immanence and representation (to borrow Deleuze’s terms) emerges from Joyce’s “memory fabled,”⁵ later termed “stolentelling” in Finnegans Wake. Joyce binds fable to fact and fact to fable,⁶ a process that arguably gave rise to the extensive practice of annotating his work.

Accordingly, this paper asks: how does annotation, now almost synonymous with Joycean scholarship, (re)shape our understanding of Joyce’s texts? And might this practice ideologically or epistemologically distort the immanence it seeks to clarify?

Jack Rodgers

‘Two Names for One Thing’: Mangan, Shem, and Joyce’s ‘revolt against actuality’

Near the end of his 1902 essay “James Clarence Mangan,” Joyce remarks on what he calls “two names for one thing”: “history” and “the denial of reality” (59). Rich with implicit and explicit references to Blake–who the essay obliquely refers to as “the most enlightened of Western poets” (53)–this piece offers a striking early Joycean ars poetica in which poetry “is always a revolt against artifice… against actuality” (59). This paper, focusing on “James Clarence Magnan,” its 1907 revision, and its adaptation in Stephen Hero, examines the mirrored “denial of reality” and “revolt against… actuality” as a site for Joyce’s theorization and revision of romanticism in a modernist key. In doing so, it aims to draw out a kind of visionary sensibility essential to Joyce’s developing aesthetics. Finally, it will take a brief look toward Shem in Finnegans Wake–whose “indelible ink” of “obscene matter” is inscribed through the Blakean process of “corrosive sublimation” (185)–to demonstrate how this early negotiation both lingered and transformed almost four decades later in a text which seems to deny and affirm both “actuality” and “history.” In tracing this thread from 1902 to 1939, it gestures at new avenues for thinking about the character of mythopoesis and the “mythic method” in Joyce’s fiction and critical prose.

Laura Karttunen

What can Joyce do for Narrative Medicine? Perspective taking in reading and rewriting “A Painful Case”

Perspective taking – adopting the psychological point of view of another person – is a common learning objective in Narrative Medicine. The students typically practice this skill by rewriting a story from a different character’s point of view. My paper explores what happens when medical students read and rewrite Joyce’s “A Painful Case,” a story which is remarkable for the problematic way in which the protagonist and focalizer James Duffy usurps the role of “painful case” and sympathy is denied to Emily Sinico, the person who died in sad circumstances (e.g. Vesala-Varttala: Sympathy and Joyce’s Dubliners, 1999). The scarcity of information about Emily’s thoughts and the disgusted response of everyone to her tragic death make it difficult to adopt her perspective. Taking Bortolussi, Dixon, and Linden’s (2018) definition of perspective taking – the reader shares the interpretations and evaluations of a character – as a starting point, I will first analyze the structure of the story to pinpoint the crucial evaluations. I will then analyze six rewritings of the story and consider the kinds of changes the students have made, such as adding consciousness representation or exposition, but also aligning with Emily’s interest point of view in a more intangible way. The analysis contributes to our understanding of empathy in “A Painful Case”. The paper ties in with the theme of the symposium by considering the ‘doubles’ of Emily Sinico constructed by the students.

Zoe Patterson

The Two-Headed Reading Group Sees Twice As Many Stars As Usual: Joyce reading groups, academic and non-academic readers, and combined reading methodolgies

How do we distinguish between academic and non-academic readership of Joyce? On its surface, Joyce’s readership can be split into these two camps which, broadly speaking, each come to the text with different backgrounds and purposes. Academic readership often entails a specific educational background and is typically focused on reading for professional purposes, while non-academic readership covers a more diverse scope of educational backgrounds and is primarily centered on reading for personal enrichment and enjoyment. These two camps of readers, however, do not always constitute a divided readership; in certain spaces, they function instead as a double readership. One of the spaces in which this takes place is within non-academic Joyce reading groups; that is, groups that include readers of all backgrounds, both academic and non-academic. This paper investigates how Joyce reading groups blur the boundaries between what one might consider academic and non-academic methodologies of reading Joyce and, in doing so, create an intertwined, double readership. It will do so by examining factors such as reading and interpretive practices utilized by these groups, group dynamics, and direct interactions between these groups and institutional forms of Joyce scholarship. In doing so, this paper will examine how these reading groups expand the scope of what participation in Joyce scholarship can look like, bringing it beyond institutionally sanctioned conditions of employment and publication.

Magnus Persson

Notes towards the Definition of Passionate Reading as a Way of Life

What do we actually know about passionate reading as a lived culture (Williams 1958)? Can an intense and multifaceted commitment to literature be considered a kind of lifestyle, “an equipment for living” (Burke 1974)? And what similarities and differences exist between the professional and the ordinary reader’s passionate relation to literature (Majumdar & Vadde 2020, Persson 2024)? To explore these questions, I participated in The Trieste Joyce School in the summer of 2025 and conducted an autoethnographic case study (Ellis 2004), drawing on interviews and field notes. From several perspectives, both the topic and the methodology appear simultaneously fruitful and risky, quickly generating a number of potentially conflicting doubles: expert and fan, insider and outsider, front stage and back stage, “high” and “low” cultural discourses.

I have myself been a devoted reader of Joyce since my late teens. But I am not a Joyce scholar. My relationship to Joyce is perhaps better described by the word “fan”. Fans, however, are primarily associated with popular cultural phenomena such as football and rock music, not with the literary canon (Jensen 1992). I will argue that the similarities between the reading practices of scholars and fans of Joyce are as significant as the differences, and that various hybrid and playful approaches are common, and constitute a fascinating field of study. This paper offers a series of autoethnographical glimpses into the diverse forms of passionate reading that emerge at the intersection of scholars, amateurs, and fans, during a week at The Trieste Joyce School.

Joe Nugent and Joshua Gorniak

JoyceWays

This joint paper is a presentation of JoyceWays, an interactive guide to the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Originally created by Professor Joseph Nugent and Boston College students, the app helps readers follow Bloom, Stephen, and Joyce through more than 100 real locations from the novel, connecting the text to the streets, pubs, landmarks, and movements of Dublin. Now revived with the help of AI, JoyceWays offers a cleaner user experience, Google Maps-powered tracking, and new interactive features that let users personalize their journey, explore the novel through its characters, and experience Ulysses as something they can walk, hear, and inhabit.

Clara Scholz

“The Author’s Life, Afterlife and Impact on Record – Challenges of Modern Archiving at the James Joyce Centre, Dublin”

From September to October 2025 I had the honour and privilege to be employed by the James Joyce Centre in Dublin during an internship in their archive. The work I was conducting there ranged from establishing order in an unsorted archival system, categorising a variety of items connected to the life of Joyce, to researching and preparing future exhibitions.

This paper will describe my experience working so intimately with objects associated with James Joyce, including the opportunities and challenges that came with modernizing a somewhat neglected archive. This will cover an exploration of appropriate solutions and case-specific example of storage difficulties, as well as giving a basic overview of the importance of archiving today. This paper will argue that, to ensure keeping our literary heritage alive, we have to rethink and modernize the way we treat our literary archives and the objects within.

Furthermore, I hope to explore how the archival work I was conducting corresponds to the themes of this year’s conference. While the archive is an entity in itself, the objects in it can branch out further, allowing for new spaces of research to open up. Thus, the archive turns into a space of doubling, mirroring and exploration of life and afterlife and, therefore, of making a whole of something dual or double.

Martin Muelheim

Joyce’s Spectral Siblings: From Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Reading Joyce’s Portrait alongside Stephen Hero produces a strange kind of double vision. The texts cover much the same fictional terrain but exist, as it were, at a slight angle to each other. In this talk, I will focus on a particularly striking difference: the role of Stephen Dedalus’s siblings. In Stephen Hero, one brother is a key companion, and a sister dies from tuberculosis. In Portrait, by contrast, Stephen’s siblings remain in the background – and none of them dies.

I will begin by outlining four approaches to literary siblings: (1) biographical (i.e. assessing the extent to which literary sibling relationships are shaped by the author’s); (2) contextual (i.e. relating fictional siblings to broader socio-historical/psychological patterns of sibling behavior); (3) intertextual (i.e. comparing a text’s siblings to those in other literary works, including religious and mythological stories); and (4) conceptual (i.e. investigating political/philosophical notions of siblinghood – e.g. fraternité – and their importance within a given text).

Concentrating on the fourth of these approaches, I will argue that Joyce’s reconceptualized roles for Stephen’s siblings in Portrait springs from his ambivalence toward fraternity and brotherhood as both exclusionary and inclusionary ideals (e.g. racialized understandings of national brotherhood vs. anti-slavery advocates’ emphasis on universal brotherhood). In other words, I contend that the spectral siblings haunting Joyce’s Portrait point to intractable impasses in political and philosophical conceptualizations of siblingship in Ireland at the close of the long nineteenth century.

Dirk Vanderbeke

From the Black Sea to Blackpool and Back: A Footnote to Fritz Senn’s Ovidian Readings of Joyce

Joyce’s interest in Ovid has, of course, been noted and researched for quite some time. But then the scholarly interest was chiefly in The Portrait, focusing on the obvious – or not so obvious – implications of the epigraph and on the culmination in the invocation of the “old artificer” on the last page. There are also some Ovidian explorations into Ulysses but not too many into Finnegans Wake. Fritz Senn wrote on Ovid and Joyce in several of his articles, for my paper I am interested in two of them. In “The Challenge: Ignotas Animum” Senn deciphers the Portrait’s epigraph, in “Ovid’s Not-Yet-Icity” he focuses on the second paragraph of Finnegans Wake. I want to argue that in “Ovid’s Not-Yet-Icity” Senn, surprisingly, missed an important point and that it could be useful to explore this point with “The Challenge: Ignotas Animum” in mind.    

Victoria Vestić

A Soul Both Fractal and Meaty: A Fractal Reading of Joyce’s A Portrait

At the end of A Portrait, Stephen Dedalus famously exclaims that he will “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”. This could be taken to imply that the “soul” Stephen refers to has already been “constructed”, in fact that this construction of a generative ‘soul’, one productive of meaning and ethics has been A Portrait’s project all along. O’Leary argues that in A Portrait, some motifs, as that of the soul “have a thematic status”, meaning “They change and develop as Stephen grows in understanding”. Leonard cites Ellmann claiming that “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in fact the gestation of a soul”, again “gestation” indicating a process. The “smithy” as a place of ‘soul construction’ seems almost paradoxical, as the doubles of material and the immaterial, flesh and soul, there mix, creating experience. It is precisely in this realm of binaries and paradoxes that fractality can be arguably found. Fractality is a type of self-referential structure usually researched in mathematics and biology (a kind of literal mimesis) in which the whole is the same or similar to each of its individual parts. These shapes “grow” from initial, usually binary structures (doubles). It is this paper’s claim that A Portrait both as a narrative, and as an experiential, ethical soul-constructing ‘machine’ can be seen as a particular type of fractal, the Cantor set.  

Holly Eva Allen

Talking About Ulysses: Gendered Speech Styles in the James Joyce Novel

Literature is language and within that larger linguistic framework is the constructed dialogue that acts as language-within-language. James Joyce’s dialogue, often witty and always rich with complexity, has been mined before from many angles—the use of obscenities, the characterized perception of language via tense, and the list goes on. There is, however, room for further linguistic analysis, particularly where gender and so-called social games are concerned. “Talking About Ulysses: Gendered Speech Styles in the James Joyce Novel,” project of University of Rhode Island scholar Holly Eva Allen, aims to fill this gap. In the 1970s, celebrated linguist Robin Lakoff presented her findings on gendered expression in English with the release of her monograph, Language and Woman’s Place. In it, Lakoff outlines how women tend to favor rapport-talk, categorized by hedging phrases, gentle modifiers, and community-based language. Men, on the other hand, tend to favor the direct language of what Lakoff calls report-talk, as well as a focus on the self and the use of vulgar hyponyms. The report-rapport framework is particularly telling when it comes to submissive-dominant posturing in conversation. The rhetorical questions Dedalus posits to Ben Dollard, Bloom’s bombastic theatrical statements, and more evince that Joyce’s two protagonists are leading double lives via dialogue. In other words, “Talking About Ulysses: Gendered Speech Styles in the James Joyce Novel” unpacks Ulysses via sociolinguistics and gender studies methodologies to reveal that Dedalus and Bloom use gendered language to create both a dominating-self and a submitting-self to overcome every situation.

Jiamei Li

Noise as Form’s Material Double: Fugal Breakdown and Sonic Events in Joyce’s “Sirens”

In “Sirens,” doubling is less a theme than a procedure: noise functions as the fugue’s material double, repeatedly sabotaging formal coherence from within. James Joyce’s designation of a “fuga per canonem” (Letters 129) has encouraged readings of the episode as a triumph of musicalised prose; this research asks instead how fugal imitation and echo confront sounds that refuse formal capture. It argues that the episode’s force lies not in the successful construction of fugal order but in its recurrent derailment by noise as its material double. Drawing on sound studies’ notion of “sounds-as-events” and close textual analysis, it examines three specific mechanisms of this acoustic doubling, demonstrating how the fugue’s claims to formal coherence, polyphonic order, and aesthetic elevation are undone—step by step—by the Ormond’s soundscape. First, Lenehan functions as an “echo” in the text: deprived of an independent melodic line, he parasitically repeats others’ speech, reducing fugal counterpoint to a stalled loop. Second, “Siopold” embodies illusory fusion. While phonetic superimposition creates a momentary mirage of subjective unity, it is instantly shattered by the percussive force of applause, revealing such fusion as a fleeting auditory fantasy. Third, the barmaids’ bodily sounds invert the Siren myth: their voices are not cast as divine song but as the bar’s material noise—commercial banter, fabric rustling, the snap of a garter—displacing sublimity into mundane sound.

Consequently, the “double” functions as a recurring acoustic process: fugal imitation and echo do not secure formal order so much as expose its vulnerability to material noise. The episode situates this vulnerability within two pressures shaping Dublin’s sonic field—colonial memory (invoked by “The Croppy Boy”) and capitalist tempo (marked by Boylan’s “steelyringing” carriage). Unable to suture this rift, the fugue yields to the flatulent “Pprrpffrrppfff,” a bodily remainder that foregrounds sound as event over aesthetic cohesion.

Olena Tykhomyrova

James Joyce and Social Dancing: a Double Perspective of a Reader and a Dancer

The paper focuses on social dancing in Joyce’s texts, particularly on the Lancers quadrille in The Dead and the quadrille performed in “Circe” chapter of Ulysses. Applying the framework suggested by Cheryl A. Wilson, who studied intertextual relationships between the actual social dance and its literary representations in the 19^th century novels, the paper seeks to elucidate structural and semiotic connections between dance and writing in Joyce’s texts. In her critique, Olena relies both on her literary background and on her lived experience of dancing acquired at La Rêverie Historical Dance Studio in Kyiv, which reconstructs social dances of various epochs.

Matthew James Hodgson

Joyce, Derrida, and Mothers: Touch, Self-Alterity, and Misdoublings

In ‘The Night Watch,’ Jacques Derrida complicates the concept of doubleness between mother and child with the unkillable condition of maternity which exists between them. This (m)other is not a version of the child, but an other that comes before the child, a distorted double. The state of distorted or uneven doubleness motivates matricidal desire, but the act itself is always attempted and failed, which results in phantasmic haunting by maternity: the fact of one’s unalterable origin and inscription. This is a structural attempt to annihilate one’s origin which instigates a perpetual exile from full self-presence. The self is inevitably tied to and dependent on the (m)other, so that any haunting is a haunting of oneself by oneself. The following investigation engages one of the most intriguing encounters between a mother and child in James Joyce’s Ulysses: between Stephen Dedalus and his mother in ‘Circe.’ In this encounter we witness a bodily manifestation of the phantasmic mother, physical contact between her and the son, and, miraculously, the son’s symbolic killing of her. In another text by Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, he emphasizes the trace of the touch: in this case, the touch of the self and not-self simultaneously. This seems to suggest a failure of doubling at the bodily level, since the question of whether or not the mother and child are one body or two bodies lingers after material separation. According to Derrida, the non-self-identical material body is the site of a union between singularity and otherness: uneven doubleness: dissymmetry, split unity. The touch, likewise, would bear in it the trace of one’s origin.

Anna Pulit

Leopold Bloom: “the new womanly man”

The aim of this paper is to analyse the character of Leopold Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses through the prism of a society that does not deem him to be a proper man. Because of his Jewish heritage and an atheist view of the world, and additionally because of the acceptance of his wife’s affair, he is seen as a stranger in the 20th century Ireland where the norm is to be a Catholic masculine man in charge of the whole family. He is treated by his fellow men more like a woman who is inferior in rank to them rather than a man on the same hierarchical standing. Bloom’s anxieties about such perception can be glimpsed in the Circe episode where he becomes a woman without any autonomy. It shows Bloom’s entrapment between being a man and simultaneously playing a role of a woman and being thus aligned with more of a female behaviour. I would like to analyse such dual perception of his gender through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex where she states that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”, woman being here a concept defined by society. For centuries, women have been seen as the other, the object, while men were the absolute, the subject. In theory Bloom should belong to the latter type yet in practice he is closer in categorisation to the former because of his feminine nature as well as his foreign background that is perceived with suspicion by other men.  

Zoey Sheinberg

Masculine Nations, Sexualities, and Lucky Potatoes:
Deconstructing Leopold Bloom’s Masculinities in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Critical approaches to Joyce’s depiction of masculinity in Ulysses have been primarily conducted through lenses of postcoloniality or queerness. By combining these strategies, this paper reveals how Joyce writes Leopold Bloom as an Ireland personified. In merging conceptions of masculinity as represented by nationalism and sexuality, I illustrate the parallels between the character of Bloom and the nation of Ireland, demonstrating how Joyce reconstructs an Irish nation and masculinity by way of Bloom. Both Ireland and Jewishness have been historically feminized, and Bloom mirrors these characterizations. By way of his doubly colonized nature, I illustrate the parallels between Bloom’s lack of access to nationhood and Ireland’s. Using Lacanian ideas of the phallus in tandem with colonialism, I further that Bloom is representative of colonial emasculation through his sexuality and queerness. Such colonial othering emasculates him within the confines of the nation and Bloom’s impotence and loss of Molly further feminize him within the home. Finally, I bring masculinity as characterized by nation and sexuality together through Bloom’s lucky potato: contending that the potato serves as a deconstructive symbol for the binaries of colonizer and colonized, masculine and feminine, and, thus, reestablishes Bloom’s access to a masculine identity by giving him a key to his home and a prop-phallus. My essay concludes thatJoyce reveals masculinity as nothing but veiled and contradictory notions of nationhood, religion, and sexuality–– and Bloom’s colonial and sexual feminization is exactly how Joyce reimagines the possibilities for masculinity.  

Bartłomiej M. Gąsiorek

The Reflections: Mythical Doubles and Jungian Shadows in James Joyce’s Ulysses” and Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Wedding

The paper argues that the mythological and fantastical figures in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Wedding act as symbolic manifestations of the Jungian Shadow archetype. Through the comparative analysis of mythic themes in both texts, the paper demonstrates how the authors repurposed fantastical imagery to initiate dialogues between realistic characters and their shadow-doubles to address the internal discourses between the present and unresolved historical past of their communities. Confrontations between said character pairings – Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, or Poet and Black Knight for instance – are interpreted as textual visualizations of the Jungian integration with the Shadow. The latter is a sum of elements repressed by the national collective, which found embodiments in symbolic, personal forms. The doubling employed in both works highlights the common, internal disintegration of Irish and Polish communities, initially caused by psychological tensions resulting from socio-historical circumstances. The texts then, while staging imaginative attempts at national reconciliation, serve as speculative sites for processes of individuation. Methodology used in the paper draws on the academic work of Vladimir Propp to conduct a functional mapping of the characters and determine their role in the reintegration process. Carl Jung’s psychological work, on the other hand, provides the theoretical framework for classifying said characters and their doubles using the archetypal vocabulary, to build a coherent system of relationships functioning within the model of Self. By bringing together Jungian theory and comparative analysis, the paper contributes to discussions of early twentieth-century literature in terms of doubling and national memory.

Barry Keane

Consolations for Rudy and Orszula. The Shared Frames of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Jan Kochanowski’s Threnodies

Written in a form unknown to Classical or Renaissance authors, the Treny [Threnodies] (1580) of Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) is regarded as his greatest literary achievement and its genesis lay in the death of his two-year daughter Orszula, in response to which he wrote this poetic cycle of nineteen poems. Throughout the course of this revered work, featuring poems of varying length and style that range from epigram to elegy to epitaph, not to mention psalmodic song, Kochanowski endeavors to intimate the true depth of his feelings for Orszula and to come to terms with the revelation of his own innate human frailty. But just as Kochanowski at the beginning of the Threnodies calls upon all and sundry to come to his home to help him mourn his daughter, Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses will leave his home as a solitary figure on the morning of 16 June 1904, and carry the memory of his child, Rudy, passed 10 years, around with him on his Odyssean traversion of Dublin city. As this paper will look to show, the journey which Bloom embarks upon, which will ultimately take him back to the memory of a happier home and time, mirrors in part the consolatory path which Kochanowski undertakes in a creative sense. Aside from the similarity of the frames, to include considerations of the unspoken silence between grieving father and mother, I shall also consider the bibliographical overlays shared by Kochanowski and Joyce, not least their respective sojourns in Italy, and their mastery of classical literature.   

Adam Kerker

“Doublejoynted” Conversations: The Dialogical Ethics of Finnegans Wake

Taking Finnegans Wake’s comic dialoguesas jumping-off points for exploring a possible Joycean theory of ethics having at its center the aim of creating the as-of-yet uncreated conscience of the Irish race, I will concentrate on the moments in the Wake when Joyce seeks to depict the fractured relationship of the brothers Shem and Shaun, literary artist and deliverer or publisher of art respectively, always to some extent at odds, by making use of doubles for these characters who attempt, but fail, to engage one another in fruitful conversation. What I will seek to further develop in extending Marian Eide’s work in Ethical Joyce is the connection between an aesthetics adopting as its key symbol the smithy of the soul and an ethics given its content through the interaction of individual souls who, confused, hardly know themselves and how they relate to others. To draw the connecting line between the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Joyce’s project, I limit myself to the dialogue of Mutt and Jute in the first chapter of the Wake.While this pair, doubles of Shem and Shaun, dramatizes the originary encounter of the Irish with their Jute invaders, the true import of their dialogue for Joyce studies lies, I contend, in the dialogue form itself. It testifies to the difficulty of completing a project committed to the act of creating a conscience when the subject in possession of it cannot understand how to act in the presence of others or speak meaningfully to them.

Henry Mead

From Opposite Poles: Joyce and Lewis as Doubles

If Krakow was a double for Joyce’s Ireland – partitioned, Catholic, historically dispossessed – then Poland might stand for a modernist condition defined by exile, dislocation and historical fracture. Wyndham Lewis suggested as much in his figure of ‘the Pole’, an émigré of uncertain identity encountered in artistic enclaves, posing as a genius to win patrons. In The Wild Body (1928), Lewis renders the ‘Pole’ protean and mimetic, shadowed by aristocratic dispossession – and not wholly distinct from himself: contemporaries remarked on his vaguely ‘Russian’ appearance.

When Joyce met Lewis in Paris in 1921, the two recognised a likeness in the other. Both had fashioned themselves as rootless intellectual artists in exile. Joyce warily acknowledged his double: ‘You may paint this but I will write it.’ Yet recognition soon hardened into polarity. Lewis’s characteristic manoeuvre – attack on those closest to him – recast shared ground as opposition. In Time and Western Man (1927) he framed Joyce as a vitalist absorbed in interior flux; Joyce responded parodically in Finnegans Wake (1939). The double becomes adversary.

In Lewis’s Childermass (1928), the protagonist Pullman resembles a Joyce-like intellectual seduced by the ‘time philosophy’ of his age; Apes of God (1930), a ‘doubling’ of Ulysses, extends the charge. Yet when Pullman returned in The Human Age (1951–55) his Joycean persona gives way to a Lewisian one, regretting his support for fascism and drawn to prayer – confirming Joyce’s 1927 prediction of Lewis’s Catholic turn. In his affinities with Joyce on one hand, and ‘the Pole’ on the other, Lewis’s work illustrates modernism’s deeper contest between flux and form, vitality and a sense of lost doctrinal order.

Cassie Drieschner

Anti-Colonial Possibilities and Appropriated Identities in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Post-colonial readings of Ulysses flood contemporary Joyce criticism. In Ulysses, Joyce’s fragmentary style illuminates an avenue in which to explore the text’s radicality: an anticoloniality outside of a reactionary cultural nationalism. The text’s engagement with cultural traditions outside of an English-Irish dependency eases the tension of this binary, reactionary opposition; the text attempts to put down “the cracked lookingglass” of the Irish artist. However, Ulysses’ use of “external” cultural fragments to contest English hegemony raises questions of commodification and appropriation. Does Ulysses reproduce a rendition of marginalized, colonized voices to foreground Irish sovereignty? Building on Lloyd’s argument that Ulysses lacks voice, the text’s fragmentation undermines Joyce’s perceived appropriation of marginalized, colonized voices. Instead, working with Venegas’ explication of Joyce’s struggle with inherited “forms of expression,” the text’s fragments reaffirm the work’s textuality. Ulysses emphasizes the textual mediation of the denigrative cliches and caricatures in the text leaving the colonized, marginalized voices it duplicates intact. While Ulysses’ fragmentary textuality evades a simple commodification of external “subordinate” voices, this evasion does not facilitate a reading of Ulysses as a liberatory text unmediated by imperial and colonial perversity. Despite the text’s anti-colonial prowess, Ulysses still exposes an entangled imperial network and the growing complicity of a bourgeoning national petty bourgeoisie. And yet, while it appears that the Fanonian “pioneers” do not enjoy a historical precedent or aesthetic mode of representation in Ulysses, the text maintains a radical anti-colonial thread in its ability to create space within an English-Irish colonial entanglement.

Vincent Rasmussen

“What Is Your Nation?” The Napoleonic Wars and Historical Doubling in Joyce

Questions of nationhood are central to James Joyce’s work. Through his network of historical allusions, Joyce presents history as an inescapable part of everyday life, yet one shaped by biased narratives. Joyce’s lifelong engagement with the Napoleonic Wars exemplifies this concern. Ulysses symbolically opens in a Martello tower built to defend Dublin against a possible French invasion, demonstrating how past European conflict still shapes ordinary Irish lives. Additionally, Joyce highlights how traces of the Napoleonic Wars are physically present throughout Dublin in monuments such as Nelson’s Pillar, constructed from French guns captured at Trafalgar and referenced in Ulysses, and in the Wellington Monument, built with guns from Waterloo, in Finnegans Wake.

This paper will explore how Joyce reconfigures historical events and monuments across time periods and narrative contexts, creating what may be described as historical doubling, in which historical events are mirrored and reframed within Joycean narratives. In Ulysses, this doubling operates through historical allusions embedded in everyday Dublin life, while in Finnegans Wake, particularly in the opening “Museyroom” episode, this doubling becomes cyclical and overtly multi-layered. As such, Napoleonic monuments in Dublin, intended to commemorate Irish participation in the British army and to assert imperial identity in Ireland, are transformed by Joyce into doubled literary spaces which interrogate and occasionally build upon these histories. Through this engagement with the Napoleonic Wars, Joyce questions national histories and reveals the fragility of nationalist memory during Ireland’s gradual transition into full independence.

Kumiko Yamada

Encounter and conflict: the coalescence of BUTT and TAFF and beyond

The tale of how Buckley shot the Russian general told by BUTT to TAFF in Finnegans Wake 338.4 to 355.7 is one of its most complicated passages, written in part as a representation of a television performance. BUTT and TAFF and the Russian general are in turn doubles of Shem and Shaun and HCE (Rose and O’Hanlon 179f): Shem telling Shaun of how he hesitates but eventually shoots his father in a rage. The story told by BUTT to TAFF, the two sometimes switching roles, is one of encounter, conflict, compassion, and anger at the Siege of Sebastopol (1854-55). The Finnegans Wake reading group of Tokyo started in 1991 and continues to date. One of the chapters that had been skipped until later was II.3, which we set about to read online in 2021, hardly aware then that war in Crimea was a reality. What looked like a script with the dialogue of BUTT and TAFF and italicized stage directions in parentheses, was replete with reference to wars of the last century and incorporating languages of the parties concerned: English, Russian, Ukrainian, French, Greek, German, Irish, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Polish, and Japanese. In addition, Joyce displays his knowledge of latest technology many of which were developed for military purposes: “Down the photoslope in syncopanc pulses … borne by their carnier walve” (349.10-12), “(T)he abnihilisation of the etym” (353.23), “hapsnots” (358.2), “fiscimilar phases” (358.3). This paper seeks to discuss the seeming coalescence of “BUTT and TAFF” (354.7) to consider what Joyce was doing with words in the century of wars.

Elisa Moy

“Sculpting Selfsounder”: Reading the Not-Yet-Formed  in Finnegans Wake

This paper engages with sculpture in Finnegans Wake as encouraging plural imaginings of what is not-yet-formed. Sculpture in the Wake takes the reader elsewhere: it extends and doubles, valuing the imaginative work of reading. Whilst scholarship on sculpture in Joyce has largely focused on haptic encounters in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, this paper traces a neglected kinetic, sculptural logic in Finnegans Wake. Revisiting how Joyce read Ruskin’s account of Daedalus as endowing sculpture with a life of movement, I argue that Finnegans Wake transforms reading into an act of sculpting itself: not excavatory nor haptic, but imaginative, kinetic, and perpetually unfinished. Central to the argument is Joyce’s recurrent return to Dedalus as an unstable, partially absent figure. Through readings of the Wake’s contractions of the name (‘dedal’), Joyce’s letter concerning framing a bas-relief of Dedalus, and notebook reflections on ‘imaginary movement in space,’ I suggest that sculpture in Joyce functions through imaginative extension. Drawing on Rosalind Krauss’s conception of sculpture as ‘ontological absence,’ alongside Derrida’s idea of the frame, this studies how Joyce transforms sculpture into a site of perpetual possibility. The paper culminates in a reading of the Wake’s phrase ‘sculpting selfsounder’ as a theory of reading. Through rhythmic and associative proliferations, readers participate in acts of imaginative projection that continually remake both textual form and the reading self. Reading Finnegans Wake thus becomes a kinetic and unfinished engagement with the not-yet-formed.

Keith Williams

‘Stone cold and pure?’ Living Statues in Ulysses

This paper addresses doubling through ‘living statues’ in Joyce’s novel and their intermedial parallelism with the same theme in early cinema. This figures in many different forms.

Recent research shows ‘Pygmalionism’ is a meta-cinematic and pervasive theme in early films, but performance of living statues was remediated from stage acts counterfeiting poses from classical sculptures, sometimes in risqué contexts using the alibi of high culture, and in magic lantern shows bringing plaster figures to life using the ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ device. Cinema presented new technological means of simulating moving bodies, doubling living presences in the most virtual way possible at that time. Significantly, in one film shown at Joyce’s Volta Cinematograph in Dublin, Sister Angelica, a Legend of Lourdes (Pathé 1909), a medieval nun is forbidden to leave her convent and comfort her dying lover, until a statue of the Virgin miraculously takes her place. Ulysses reflects and interrogates this interchange: from Bloom’s anatomical examination of goddesses at the National Library; to the erotic Photo-bits nymph who steps out of the frame on his bedroom wall and ‘morphs’ into a nun; to Molly’s recollections of peeking at statuesque male swimmers on Gibraltar; to Olympian postures assumed by celebrity Jewish strongman, Eugen Sandow, which featured both in kinetoscope shows and photographic illustrations to his best-selling training manual on the Blooms’ bookshelf.

Joyce engages with this key aspect of early cinema through both a male and female gaze, as well as the changing status of classical imagery remediated in modernity.

Jeffrey Drouin

St. Augustine in Reverse: Confessional Accountancy in The Book of Days of Stanislaus Joyce

The Trieste diary of Stanislaus Joyce, known as The Book of Days and covering the years 1907 to 1909, is a seldom-studied repository of information about the life of James Joyce during the fertile period in which his early works were completed and the later ones began. What is less known is that the quality of the writing makes it an exceptional literary project in its own right. Alternately raw, refined, intellectual, and emotional, Stanislaus’ diary presents a living portrait of Trieste as experienced by a young man attempting to define himself and forge a path in life on his own terms. The Stanislaus of the diary is not merely Jim’s “whetstone” but rather an independently-minded (if acerbic) young writer who is likewise pursuing a new expression of modernity. In narrating the struggle to free himself from the twin burdens of Catholicism and Virginity, he draws upon and subverts genres such as the confessional (particularly St. Augustine) and, surprisingly, combines them with his professional background in accounting to enact an “account” in various interrelated senses of the term. He tracks debits and credits in the household budget and in funds sent back to Dublin, tallies the number of drinks that Jim consumes on a daily basis, numbers his own daily sleep/exercise/walks/interactions with acquaintances, and records his romantic interest in students and other young women, consolidating it all in a self-critical reflection in which the ledger of his soul is not balanced in a summa but is laid bare in a denial of closure. This presentation will discuss ways in which The Book of Days is not just a diary but a coherent narrative project that employs its own mythic method to stand as a significant work of the modernist movement.

Walter Gehr

James Joyce and Austria

The paper examines James Joyce’s ambivalent relationship with Austria, both in work and biography. This relationship is shaped by Austria in its historical form as double, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.  

Biographically, Joyce’s stays in Pula and Trieste, now cities in Croatia and Italy, respectively, are well known. However, he also travelled to cities located in what is now the territory of the Republic of Austria, in particular Feldkirch where Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake. The fate of Ulysses was decided in this city because he narrowly escaped arrest there in 1915 “as an enemy alien”.

When Joyce settled in Switzerland in 1916, the Austrian Embassy in Bern made inquiries about his relationship to Austria. Although Joyce had expressed aversion to the Austrian aristocracy – which is also reflected in Ulysses – the diplomatic reports on Joyce are quite favourable. 

In 1936, a letter of congratulation signed by hundreds of artist including James Joyce was presented in Vienna to Sigmund Freud – whose „entire libido belonged to the dual monarchy” – on the occasion of his 80th birthday, a surprising move, considering that Joyce, the inventor of Leopold Bloom as the “new womanly man” had stated that “I have  nothing  to  do  with  psychoanalysis”. 

In Joyce’s work, the most notable reference is Leopold Bloom’s father’s connection to the dual Monarchy, especially since Rudolf Bloom is from “Szombathely, Vienna, Budapest, Milan,” in addition to “London and Dublin”. Finally, the paper provides a review of Austrian references (e.g. Julius Pokorny or Maximilian Karl O’Donnell) in Joyce’s work.