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On July 13, 1904, not long after he had commenced his first attempt to write a novel, the young James Joyce signed a note to George Roberts with the alias "James Overman." The self-applied label has been dismissed by many biographers and critics, including Richard Ellmann, as little more than an ironic joke-appended, as it is, to a comically overstated letter card asking for the loan of a quid.1 How else, after all, could we read this allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche's infamous creation, understood as, say, the exemplar of the self-affirming individual, capable of transcending the slave morality of Christianity and the nihilism of modern European society? This reference to Nietzsche's philosophy, however, should not be so easily dismissed, if only to entertain the attitude behind Joyce's own suggestion in regard to another hero of his youth: that a "postcard written by Ibsen will be regarded as interesting and so will A Doll's House."2 Even if Joyce's note does not merit as much attention as Ulysses (1922), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), or Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944), it can help us to appreciate previously overlooked aspects of those texts, to shed some light on the complex relationship between Continental philosophy and Irish modernism, and thus to understand better certain features of Joyce's modernist project, its ethical significance, its affective investments. What could it mean for the young James Joyce- this shabby son of the new Catholic middle class in Ireland, this colonial subject, this provincial intellectual, this cosmopolitan wannabe, this unapologetic debtor, this fledgling socialist, this aspiring artist, this great ironist-to call himself "James Over- man?" Addressing this question does not necessitate returning to an outmoded vision of Joyce as an international modernist, but observing anew the tensions, interplay, and exchange between his Irish commitments, with their "subaltern" or "semicolonial" valences, and his flirtations with the avant-garde of European thought, especially as it engages with issues such as modernity, self-formation, and cultural dissidence. To be sure, the multiple contexts and subject positions suggested in the question seem to promise not the isolation or foreclosure of meaning but the proliferation of interpretive possibilities. What is more, the figure of the Overman or Übermensch possesses a stubborn, if evocative, indeterminacy...