Recent Reformations of Joyce

WITH A SENSE OF FATIGUE, a number of critics have pointed out the variety of factual studies on Joyce which probably reached a peak at the end of the seventies: biographies, concordances, dictionaries, different types of annotation lists, numerous studies of Joyce-and-something-else (alchemy, heraldry, politics, cities) or Joyce-and-someone-else (Aquinas, Shakespeare, Dante, Ibsen, D'Annunzio). As Derek Attridge has noted, The academic machinery that once turned out useful information to guide the ordinary reader through the Joycean maze has become an uncheckable generator of endlessly proliferating secondary literature, revealing in toto something about Joyce's texts (and all literary texts?) to which each individual contribution, in its attempt to arrive at final answers, is oblivious: the infinite productivity of interpretive activity, the impossibility of closing off the processes of signification, the incessant shifting and opening-out of meaning in the act of reading and re-reading. (1984, 7-8) This sense of the end of an era in Joyce criticism is coming not only from those who identify themselves with post-structuralism. We might note, for example, the disgust and despair expressed with the traditional Joyce industry by Roland McHugh in The Finnegans Wake Experience, such a turn-around for the accumulator of Wakean factoids, the entomologist turned etymologist of Annotations to Finnegans Wake. It can be sensed in the defensive postures of many Joyce critics who emerged in the sixties and early seventies. It can be sensed in the announced programs of all of the

Art · Giambattista Vico and Joyce · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism

• Joyce's Uncertainty Principle

  Open Access•Sonja Bašić, Phillip F Herring•South Central Review•1989

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• The Joycean Gaze

  Philip Kuberski, Carol et al.•SubStance•1985

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