Attuned to echoes and afterlives of Joyce’s works in the Americas, and how Joyce’s work engages with American attitudes, this panel sees Joyce as a connecting figure, one whose words were both transformative and were transformed by American letters, periodicals, land, and soundscapes.
Aiming to treat Joyce’s work as a formative lens and prism to study cultural, artistic, and identity politics across genres in American discourse, this MLA special session approaches afterlives and influences. We examine the effects of the atrocious American white supremacy as reflected in Ulysses, Joyce as a mid-century figure in New York of the Jewish diaspora, iterations of Joyce’s work in the performances of John Cage, and Cuban writer José Lezama Lima’s understudied avant-garde journals of the 1930s and ‘40s.
In her paper, Emily Schuck maps out the broader transatlantic cultural landscapes of the musical adaptations of Joyce’s work made by John Cage in collaboration with Merce Cunninham, drawing on early work from Marjorie Perloff, Cage’s own philosophies with approaches to art, and original correspondence. Attentive to the movement of the Joycean text across both oceans and media, and focusing on reviews and documented reception, her paper explores the ways that American audiences have experienced Cage’s Joyce-inspired works, from the well-studied Roaratorio to the lesser-known The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, “draw[ing] sustenance from romantic perceptions of Ireland and pull[ing] us into a politics of identity” (Williams). Such afterlives—from initial receptions to twenty-first century performances—highlight, she argues, the lasting resonance of Joyce’s work in American music.
Focusing on Joyce’s resonance specifically in New York City, Jonathan Ezra Goldman addresses the championing of Joyce by figures such as Gilbert Seldes, Samuel Roth, and Frances Steloff from WWI to mid-century, proposing that Joyce became interwoven with Jewish diasporic identity consciousness.
Similarly, Margot Gayle Backus explores Joyce’s deployment of American white supremacist violence in the composition of “Cyclops” and maps this dynamic’s emergence. She focuses on Joyce’s references to white supremacist violence to evoke unifying/mobilizing ethnonationalist rage stirred up by Limerick’s anti-Jewish demagogue, Father Creagh.
From the outset, Joyce planned to conclude “Cyclops” with Bloom’s violent expulsion from Barney Kieran’s pub, reenacting the 1904 Limerick riots that drove many of Limerick’s already-disenfranchised Jews into “the barbed wire labyrinth” of statelessness (Arendt). Joyce shows growing awareness that the “religion of white rage” disseminated by pro-lynching organs like the American National Police Gazette was more immediately mobilizing than earlier ethnonationalisms. Following the 1919 summer of mass lynchings in the US, Joyce recognized in Irish nationalism the white supremacist propensity for hair-trigger scapegoating as the unconscious price of secure ethnonationalist belonging. Joyce revisits the Police Gazette, already present, associated with pulchritudinous women and off-color scandals, adding a horrific pro-lynching article headlined “Black Beast Burned.” The atmosphere in the pub changes as the drinkers become the mob that render Bloom stateless. Interrogating the ideas and implications of statelessness, she argues that in our current moment, statelessness bourgeons as one group after another loses the right to have rights.
Finally, also focusing on Joyce’s role in mid-century American identity formation, Casey Gough reads the 1940 Spanish translation of “Proteus,” published in José Lezama Lima’s Havana-based journal Espuela de Plata, in relation to the Cuban writers whose pieces framed and generated local meanings for this isolated episode. Notably, while Lezama Lima had composed an introductory article on “Proteus,” he nevertheless chose to preface the translation with the short story “Poesía y crimen” by his literary rival, the openly gay Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera. Gough articulates connections between this first Spanish “Proteus” translation and Piñera’s work, foregrounding their shared struggle with Catholic sexual morality and their efforts to render porous the boundary between language and the body. Piñera’s text, she argues, constitutes an exegesis that also stages, in highly corporeal language, the struggle of composing poetry on the periphery.
Because our proposed panel has four presenters, participants will plan for no longer than 13 minutes of speaking time, which will be strictly enforced by the presider.
Our session is comprised of two established scholars, an early-career scholar, and a graduate student. The panel brings together topics that focus on queer figures, unconventional forms, Jewish diaspora, and South American voices.