Cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part One: Textual Functions -- 1 Guidance Systems -- 2 Misquoting Joyce -- 3 Limited Editions, Edited Limitations -- 4 Translation, Annotation, Hesitation -- Part Two: Cultural Appropriations -- 5 Make a Stump Speech Out of It -- 6 Win a Dream Date with James Joyce -- 7 The Stephen Dedalus Diet -- Conclusion: Means Without End -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Tim Conley’s Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought difficult and far from practical, are in fact polymorphous meditations on this question. Examinations of traditional textual functions such as quoting, editing, translating, and annotating texts are set against the ways in which texts may be assigned unexpected but thoroughly practical purposes. Conley’s accessible and witty engagement with the material views the rise of explication and commentary on Joyce’s work as an industry not unlike the rise of self-help publishing. We can therefore read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as various kinds of guides and uncover new or forgotten “uses” for them. Useless Joyce invites new discussions about the assumptions at work behind our definitions of literature, interpretation, and use.

This book sheds light on how the text and physical design of James Joyce’s two most challenging works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, reflect changes that transformed Europe between World War I and II.

(Post)colonial modernity in Ulysses and Accra / Ato Quayson -- Joyce and race in the twenty-first century / Malcolm Sen -- Dubliners and French naturalism / Catherine Flynn -- Joyce and Latin American literature : transperipherality and modernist form / José Luis Venegas -- The multiplication of translation / Sam Slote -- Copyright, freedom, and the fragmented public domain / Robert Spoo -- Ulysses in the world / Sean Latham -- The intertextual condition / Dirk Van Hulle -- The macrogenesis of Ulysses and Finnegans wake / Ronan Crowley -- After the Little review : Joyce in transition / Scarlett Baron -- Popular Joyce, for better or worse / David Earle -- Joyce's nonhuman ecologies / Katherine Ebury -- Medical humanities / Vike Plock -- Joyce's queer possessions / Patrick Mullen -- The wake, ideology and literary institutions / Finn Fordham -- Joyce as a generator of new critical history / Jean-Michel Rabaté.

`Is there one who understands me?' So wrote James Joyce towards the end of his final work, Finnegans Wake. The question continues to be asked about the author who claimed that he had put so many enigmas into Ulysses that it would `keep the professors busy for centuries' arguing over what he meant. For Joyce this was a way of ensuring his immortality, but it could also be claimed that the professors have served to distance Joyce from his audience, turning his writings into museum pieces, pored over and admired, but rarely touched. In this remarkable book, steeped in the learning gained from a lifetime's reading, David Pierce blends word, life and image to bring the works of one of the great modern writers within the reach of every reader. With a sharp eye for detail and an evident delight in the cadences of Joyce's work, Pierce proves a perfect companion, always careful and courteous, pausing to point out what might otherwise be missed. Like the best of critics, his suggestive readings constantly encourage the reader back to Joyce's own words. Beginning with Dubliners and closing with Finnegans Wake, Reading Joyce is full of insights that are original and illuminating, and Pierce succeeds in presenting Joyce as an author both more straightforward and infinitely more complex than we had perhaps imagined. T. S. Eliot wrote of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, that it is `a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape'. With David Pierce as a guide, the debt we owe to Joyce becomes clearer, and the need to flee is greatly reduced.

James Joyce is now widely considered the most influential writer of the twentieth century. His name and his most important works appeared again and again in fin-de-millennium surveys. This is the case not only in the English-speaking world, but also in many European literatures. Joyce's influence is most pronounced in French, German and Italian literatures, where translations of most of his works appeared during his life-time and where he had a clear impact on his fellow-writers. In other countries and cultures, his influence took more time to register, sometimes after the war in the fifties and sixties, and sometimes only in the final decade of the century. This was the case in most of the languages of Eastern Europe, where the translation of Joyce's work could only begin after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. This book contains two volumes. Series Editor: Dr Elinor Shaffer FBA, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London Contributors to the volume include: Sonja Basic (University of Zagreb) Eric Bulson, (Columbia University) Astradur Eysteinsson (University of Reykjavik) Kalina Filipova (University of Sofia) Marta Goldmann (University of Budapest) Jakob Greve (University of Copenhagen) Manana Khergiani (New York) Teresa Iribarren (University of Barcelona) Onno R. Kosters and Ron Hoffman (The Netherlands) Alberto Lázaro (University of Alcalá, Madrid) Marisol Morales Ladrón (University of Alcalá, Madrid) Maria Filomena Louro (University of Minho, Portugal) Tina Mahkota (University of Ljubljana) John McCourt (University of Trieste) Patrick O'Neill (Queen's University, Canada) Adrian Otoiu (North University of Baia Mare, Rumania) Miltos Pehlivanos (Aristotle University, Greece) Aleš Pogacnik (Slovenia) Jina Politi (Aristotle University, Greece) Steen Klitgård Povlsen (University of Aarhus) H.K.Riikonen (University of Helsinki) Frank Sewell (University of Ulster) Sam Slote (University of Buffalo) Per Svenson (Sweden) Emily Tall (University of Buffalo) Björn Tysdahl (University of Oslo) Tomo Virk (University of Ljubljana) Jolanta W. Wawrzycka (Radford University) Robert Weninger (Oxford Brookes University) Wolfgang Wicht (University of Potsdam) Serenella Zanotti (University of Rome)