I suppose it was my lack of access to my copy of Joyce's Ulysses on the hundredth anniversary of its publication that led me to borrowing The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce from the library at work. It's a collection of essays focusing on the different works, and key concerns of Joyce, written by various hands. Well, I say concerns of Joyce, but some of the essays seem to be attempting to see where JJ stands on the burning issues of our times - stuff like feminism, sexuality, colonialism and consumer culture. As far as I can tell the great artificer seems to evade our current nets of thought, much as he evaded those of his own paralysed times.
I enjoyed dipping into the various pieces and learnt a few new things about Joyce here and there, but it wasn't any kind of replacement for reading the real thing. And I found ample evidence that I'm not at all suited to any kind of academic study of literature these days. A sentence like, To move back to textual terrain is to find Ulysses in some senses anticipating this quest for another means of qualifying the social relations of consumption, which are, in modern times, essentially what we call culture, just brings on the shudders for me - as I suspect it would have done for Joyce himself.
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