13 - Twenty-first-century critical contexts

Summary

Joyce studies are notorious for their wanton profligacy, having generated, according to the OCLC Online Union Catalog, over 15,000 monographs, articles, theses, translations and editions. The ‘James Joyce Checklist’, a regular feature of the James Joyce Quarterly almost since its inception, lists hundreds of entries in each issue from around the globe and across the humanistic disciplines. Any attempt to imagine the twenty-first-century contexts for Joyce studies – or to dream even tentatively of their immediate future – must first take some account of this past. ‘Doing justice to the reality of history’, however, as the sociologist Philip Abrams writes, ‘is a matter of treating what people do in the present as a struggle to create a future out of the past, seeing the past not just as the womb of the present but the only raw material out of which the present can be constructed’. Joyce grasped this point intuitively and sought throughout his work not simply to reconstruct the always already vanishing world of Edwardian Dublin, but to assemble from the fragments of his own past as an Irish colonial subject the ‘raw material’ for an evolving modernity. Indeed, the fact that his books continue to speak so powerfully to us and retain, even after decades of explication, the ability to fire our critical and creative imaginations speaks directly to just how discerning a judge he was in selecting these materials.