Just thought I would report that there is a large amount of periodical studies and genetic criticism (the study of manuscripts, page proofs, and other avant-texte that go into the making of a published edition of a work) at the annual Summer Joyce conference, this year being held in Buffalo. The University of Buffalo houses the largest and most important collection of Joyce's papers.
Yesterday I saw a panel containing two papers dealing with The Little Review. Amanda Sigler, a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia recontextualized the lawsuit brought against the magazine for publishing allegedly obscene sections of Joyce's novel-in-progress, Ulysses. In studying some unpublished letters of John Quinn, a well-known lawyer who defended avant-garde writers and artists against censorship in the U.S., she found references to other materials in Little Review numbers from about March-May 1918 that also alerted the authorities in the Post Office. These include erotic drawings based on Classical iconography and a pseudonymous (and fictional) letter from Ezra Pound, supposedly from a captured German soldier, ordering German soldiers go home and impregnate as many women as possible without moral or legal ramifications. Sigler's findings portray a different understanding of the Little Review lawsuit that actually takes Ulysses out of the center of it, but also highlights the ways in which various pieces in that magazine were questioning and courting censorship laws in a deliberate way.
Nancy Cushing, a doctoral candidate at Penn State, dealt with the imperial and nationalist tensions in romance fiction about South America, shedding new light on the "Nausicaa" episode of Ulysses and the story "Eveline" in Dubliners. She also recontextualized "Nausicaa" in The Little Review to show how various other pieces, as well as a novel by Henry Hudson called The Purple Land (1885), influenced the manner of Joyce's presentation of that motif in his work.
My own presentation performed a genetic reading of the "Wandering Rocks" episode of Ulysses in order to argue for influence from Einstein's special theory of relativity in the space and time relationships between events. I analyzed the fair copy manuscript to suggest evidence of Joyce's thought processes, showing that the most relativistic event-structures had been added in the margins or between the lines after the episode had been fully drafted. I then showed excerpts from articles by Dora Marsden in The Egoist from March to December 1918 that refer to relativity, as well as other examples of fiction and criticism that show an increasing editorial interest in space, time, and the nature of events.
Later this afternoon I'll be attending a presentation on archival preservation of Joyce's manuscripts and letters.
