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18th International James Joyce Symposium Sebastian D. G. Knowles, Geert Lornout, and John McCourt, eds. Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. xii + 254 pp. $59.95
JOYCE IN TRIESTE offers a thematic cross section of some 450 papers from the 2002 Eighteenth International James Joyce Symposium in Trieste, a prominent spot on the map of Joyce studies, a home of the annual International James Joyce Summer School, and a subject of numerous book-length publications. Sixteen Joyce scholars are featured in the four sections of this wide-ranging volume; they add yet another celebratory chord to the polyphony of Joycean scholarship. Aptly subtitled "An Album of Risky Readings," the book's introduction contains thoroughly risky readings of "e-mails of regret" that Sebastian Knowles had received as a program director from participants who had to withdraw from the program. The messages are classified into seven kinds of regret: Regret Formal, Physical, Paralytic, Inexplicable, Metaphysical, Apocalyptic, and Bogus. But Joycean context is the saving grace for Knowles's "somewhat malicious" parodistic vein: all seven rhetorical e-structures are hilariously echoed by textual examples from Joyce himself. There is more humor in the book, especially from Zack Bowen and Austin Briggs, and Hugh Kenner, too, offers some serenely humorous musings.
Section one features three essays on "Reading Joyce: Text, Meaning, and Language" by Michael Groden, Margot Norris and Zack Bowen. Groden presents a captivating account of his involvement in authenticating and evaluating for the National Library of Ireland newly surfaced manuscripts, notebooks and other documents in Joyce's handwriting; they were officially unveiled on 30 May 2002, just two weeks prior to the symposium. Margot Norris's essay, "Risky Readings of Risky Writings," is a poignant account of the kinds of overdetermined readings that readers of Joyce are likely to perform based on Joyce's writing style. "The gaps, occlusions, and mysteries in the Joycean texts," states Norrie, "function as performatives" not because they usay nothing: they actually do things." Joyce's gnomic and elliptical stylistic that at once implies and withholds invites determined readings without affirming their validity. Zack Bowen's essay promises "Plato, Homer, and Joyce: Involving Orientalism, a Smidgeon of Smut, and a Pinch of Perverse Egotism" and, of course, delivers....