"There is an art in lighting a fire": A Report on the Dublin James Joyce Summer School 2023

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• “There is an art in lighting a fire”: A Report on the Dublin James Joyce Summer School 2023
• Daniel Esmonde Deasy

This year the Dublin James Joyce Summer School (DJJSS) returned to its traditional week-long program in the University College Dublin Newman House, 85–86 St. Stephen’s Green. In the mornings, summer-school speakers presented their papers in the elegant Old Physics Theatre of Richard Castle’s no. 85 (1735–1740), the room in which Stephen taught the dean of studies the meaning of that good Lower Drumcondra word “tundish.” After lunch in the Saloon, attendees either joined Sam Slote for the Ulysses seminar or Christine O’Neill for Dubliners. There was a variety of social activities in the evenings and weekends, including a reception in the National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, with a welcome address in the Reading Room by the Director of the Library, Audrey Whitty; a trip to the Gate Theatre, Parnell Square East, to see a production of the musical Fun Home based on a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel; a walking tour of Joyce’s Dublin led by Monica Galindo Gonzalez; a visit to the Omphalos in Sandycove led by Anne Fogarty; and a convivial closing dinner in Baggot Street.

Since 2019, Newman House has been home to the new Museum of Literature Ireland (“MoLI” for short, pronounced “Molly” after herself), a joint venture between the National Library of Ireland and University College Dublin. MoLI hosts a significant permanent Joyce exhibition, which includes important Ulysses and Finnegans Wake manuscripts, interactive audio-visual exhibits, and a first edition and complete braille edition of Ulysses, among much else. Summer-school attendees were given a tour of the Museum and addressed [End Page 447] by its Director, Simon O’Connor. The welcome presence of MoLI in Newman House strengthens and solidifies the connection between Joyce and that beautiful complex of buildings nestled on the Green.

There were ten excellent presentations by speakers over the course of the week. Anne Fogarty’s (University College Dublin) opening lecture, “‘I cannot write without offending people’: The Composition and Reception of Dubliners,” encouraged us to remember that the book is a radical and innovative work in its own right and not merely an initial staging-post in Joyce’s artistic development. Fogarty began by highlighting Joyce’s conception of Dubliners as a political gesture, intended by Joyce to reflect the stagnation of Irish politics in the mid-1900s. She also described Joyce’s struggle to secure a publisher for the book, highlighting his “performative literary” correspondence with the publisher Grant Richards concerning its content. Finally, she demonstrated the radical modernism of the stories that compose Dubliners, which, as she showed, set the template for the modernist short story and continue to be read anew.

Niall Ó Cuileagáin’s (University College London) talk, “‘All His Blather about Home Rule and the Land League’: The Legacies of the Land War in Joyce” argued that the “Land Question” occupies a more central role in Joyce’s work than has previously been appreciated. Ó Cuileagáin began by describing the history of the Land War, a period of agrarian agitation in Ireland from the late 1870s to the 1900s. He traced the connection of the Land War to Joyce’s family and formative experiences, and then to Joyce’s work, from his 1907 essay “L’Irlanda alla Sbara” through A Portrait and Ulysses.¹ He also highlighted the thread of the Land Question as it runs through Ulysses, in particular, through Bloom’s youthful dedication to land reform, the theme of Charles Stewart Parnell and his fall, and Joyce’s use of expressions such as “[b]oycott,” “gombeen man,” and “grazier.”

Niels Caul’s (University College Dublin) talk, “Joyce’s Irish Bildungsroman: From Stephen Hero to A Portrait,” opened the second day with a comparison of the different modes that Joyce used in Stephen Hero and A Portrait to express the struggle of the artist to express his or her individuality in the face of cultural and societal norms. Caul highlighted the features of the “classic” Bildungsroman typified by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s work and the contrasting features of the modernist and colonial...