Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings

Joyce in Trieste is a record of the transformation in text, meaning, and language that Trieste worked upon Joyce. Based on presentations from the Trieste Symposium of 2002, this volume begins with three path-breaking essays: Michael Groden’s unveiling of the manuscripts acquired by the National Library of Ireland in 2002, Margot Norris’s introduction of the particularly effective paradigm of “risky reading” to describe the provocative re-contextualizations in history, theory, and culture that reveal something new about Joyce’s work, and Zack Bowen’s celebration of the Platonic and erotic qualities of Joyce’s language.

Each essay opens up to a section that follows the opening lead: essays on manuscript genetics following Groden, a political set of essays following Norris, and a set of essays on language following Bowen. Included are some final thoughts from the late Hugh Kenner, work from new Joyceans such as Vike Martina Plock and Dirk Van Hulle, and political studies of Israel and Palestine. Distilled from several hundred presentations at the conference, this volume provides a lively and useful summary of the current state and future directions of Joyce scholarship and will be of particular interest to Joyce and Irish Studies scholars as well as those interested in provocative readings of 20th-century literature.