James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century

A three-day conference, featuring public plenary lectures by Anne Fogarty, Luke Gibbons, Andrew Gibson, Emer Nolan,Jennifer Wicke.

Joyce’s position as a key figure within modernism and as a formative influence in modern Irish and European culture is assured. His work has long been understood as anticipating so much that seemingly ‘followed’, from Irish Independence to deconstruction and postmodern globalisation. Derrida describes how it is “always too late with Joyce” since he anticipates and even “invents” us. The famous opening to Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography - “We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries” – itself heralded a late-twentieth century reading of modernism as avant la lettre. Even as far back as 1920, in The Dial, Joyce was hailed as a ‘Contemporary of the Future’.

But what was Joyce’s relationship with the nineteenth century (into which he was born and educated)? How should that relationship be thought in light of the persistence of his contemporaneity? How was the modernity of Joyce, and of us, already a feature of the 19th century? In what ways does modernity carry its own uneven conditions? Can we say with assurance that the 19th century was an age that ‘preceded’ him? How have the major intellectual and historical factors of the period – such as the growth of capital and commodity culture, liberalism and technology, gender and imperial politics, decentered subjectivity, etc. – been both necessary and contingent in our formulation of Joyce? By putting Joyce back into the nineteenth century, and by putting the nineteenth century back into Joyce, we hope to re-read some of the major cultural developments of ‘our times’.

Please circulate this poster of Public Lectures, or see the details for each lecture available at: http://www.durham.ac.uk/english.studies/events. 

Contact john.nash@durham.ac.uk for more information about this event.

Related Links

• Conference Homepage: Consumer Culture, Advertising and Literature in Ireland 1848-1921