The 2009 Annual Trieste Joyce School

University of Trieste, 28 June - 4 July 2009

TJS's logo 2009
© Ann Fallon

The 2009 Trieste Joyce School was held from Sunday 28 June to Saturday 4 July.

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The afternoon seminars were led by Geert Lernout and Ilaria Natali (Genetic Joyce), Ron Ewart (Joyce and Beckett), Fritz Senn (Ulysses), Maria McGarrity (A Portrait), Tom Rice (Dubliners).

The final day, Saturday 4 July, was dedicated to the Trieste Joyce School "Festa del Libro". It was aimed not simply at the Joyce guests present but also at a broader audience. Simultaneous translation will be available for the entire session of readings and Q&As which will take place in the Sala Maggiore of the Camera di Commercio, where Joyce himself gave his "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages" lecture back in 1907. Among the authors present there were the Argentian novelist, Carlos Gamerro; Barry McCrea (a young Irish novelist based at Yale who won the 2005 Grumley prize for The First Verse); Boris Pahor (an Italian writer from the Slovenian minority in Trieste, famous for his novel Necropolis which describes his time as a prisoner in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in France); Mark Thompson (a British journalist who has recently published The White War, a history of the Italian-Austrian front in the First World War as well as A Paper House, a much-praised account of the fall of Yugoslavia.

Other social and cultural events that took place over the course of the week included:

  • A performance of Jimmy Joyced by leading Irish actor and playwright, Donal O'Kelly
  • A visit to the Carso Triestino for dinner at an Osmiza (traditional Karst farm)
  • A reception hosted by the Irish Ambassador to Italy, Mr Sean O'hUiginn
  • A Walking Tour of Joyce's Trieste
  • A Special evening organized in collaboration with Alpe Adria Cinema to commemorate the centenary of Joyce's opening of the Volta Cinema in Dublin

Speakers and guest writers included:

GUEST WRITERS

  • Carlos GamerroCarlos Gamerro was born in Buenos Aires in 1962. He has studied and taught Literature at Buenos Aires University (UBA) and teaches at present at the Universidad de San Andrès and at the Museo de arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). In 2007 he was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University and in 2008 he participated in the International Writers Workshop (Iowa).
    His publications include the novels Las Islas (Simurg, 1998; Norma, 2007), El sueño del señor juez (Sudamericana, 2000; Página 12, 2005; 27 letras, 2008), El secreto y las voces (Norma, 2002), La aventura de los bustos de Eva (Norma, 2004; Belacqua, 2006), the book of short stories El libro de los afectos raros (Norma, 2005) and the books of essays El nacimiento de la literatura argentina (Norma, 2006) and Ulises. Claves de lectura (Norma, 2008). He is at present working on a translation/adaptation of Hamlet for the stage.
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  • Las Islas
  • Donal O'KellyDonal O'Kelly will give a special performance of his one-man Joyce show Jimmy Joyced. Jimmy Joyced! looks back at 1904 through the eyes of JJ Staines, a stallholder in Dublin's Rathmines Market with a dangerous obsession for all things Joycean. JJ drives like a man possessed through the full gamut of 1904 James Joyce, from his 22nd birthday on 2nd February to his departure with Nora Barnacle on 9th October :
    • his battles with his mad dad
    • his bronze medal win for singing in the Feis
    • a crazed night of gunfire in the Sandycove Tower
    • his rescue from redlight Monto mayhem by the man he turned into Bloom
    • and above all his passion for Nora Barnacle and their fabled walk on 16th June
    Donal O'Kelly is an actor and playwright. His previous solo plays include the award-winning Catalpa and Bat The Father Rabbit The Son. His play The Cambria toured to great success in Ireland and abroad since 2005, and Operation Easter, his play about the 1916 Rising, ran to full houses in Kilmainham Jail to mark its 90th anniversary. In 2007 he toured his Mummer-style 1798 spy thriller Vive La throughout Ireland, and his music-theatre piece Running Beast, about Hugh O'Neill Earl of Tyrone, has toured to rave notices in Ireland and abroad. On screen, he is known for his roles in movies such as the recently-released Kings, The Van, Spin The Bottle, I Went Down, and the tv series Paths To Freedom and Fair City.
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  • Boris PahorBoris Pahor Acclaimed writer Boris Pahor, a member of the Slovenian minority in Italy, is best known for his novel Nekropola (Necropolis) about his time in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in France. He was awarded the prestigious Italian literary prize, the Premio Napoli, for the best foreign-language novel in Italy. On being awarded the prize, Pahor talked about having 'tasted the violence of Mussolini, Hitler and Tito, and I say to the next generations: beware.' He pointed to the reemergence of 'ideas which have caused disasters and which we hoped were buried forever'. The book became a bestseller after it was translated into Italian in 2007, more than 40 years after it was first released. Pahor has previously been awarded the Legion of Honour (Legion d'honneur), the highest French state order, and the Viareggio Literary Prize, a prestigious Italian literary prize conferred to world-acclaimed individuals who have dedicated their lives to culture, social progress and peace.
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  • Mark ThompsonMark Thompson lives in Oxford. He is the author of A Paper House, a much-praised account of the fall of Yugoslavia. He worked for the UN in the Balkans for much of the 1990s. He is also author of The White War, the first narrative history in English of the Italian front: a major forgotten conflict of the First World War.
    In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire, hoping to seize its 'lost' territories of Trieste and Tyrol. The result was one of the most hopeless and senseless modern wars - and one that inspired great cruelty and destruction. Nearly three-quarters of a million Italians - and half as many Austro-Hungarian troops - were killed. Most of the deaths occurred on the bare grey hills north of Trieste, and in the snows of the Dolomite Alps. Outsiders who witnessed these battles were awestruck by the difficulty of attacking on such terrain. General Luigi Cadorna, most ruthless of all the Great War commanders, restored the Roman practice of 'decimation', executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled. Italy sank into chaos and, eventually, fascism. Its liberal traditions did not recover for a quarter of a century - some would say they have never recovered.
    Mark Thompson relates this nearly incredible saga with great skill and pathos. Much more than a history of terrible violence, the book tells the whole story of the war: the nationalist frenzy that led up to it, the decisions that shaped it, the poetry it inspired, its haunting landscapes and political intrigues; the personalities of its statesmen and generals; and also the experience of ordinary soldiers - among them some of modern Italy's greatest writers.
    Reviews:
    "Magnificent ... original, masterly and definitive."
    - Piers Brendon in The Guardian (Book of the Week)
    "[An] excellent narrative history ... the author comes to his subject from a useful and unusual angle - he has previously written about the Balkans - and he displays an impressive acquaintance with the background and the terrain."
    - David Gilmour in The Sunday Times
    "It is impossible not to read Thompson and be moved both in emotion and in thought. This is exemplary history ... It brings an area and a time forgotten by much of Europe back into a searching light."
    - Hugh MacDonald in The Herald
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  • Las Islas

SPEAKERS AND SEMINAR LEADERS

  • William BrockmanWILLIAM BROCKMAN is the librarian for English Literature at the Pennsylvania State University Libraries. He previously held positions as a librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Drew University. As Bibliographer for the James Joyce Quarterly since 1990, he produces the "Current JJ Checklist," and presently is editor of the "James Joyce Checklist" on the Web. He has published articles and essays on Joyce within the context of modernist publishing in Joyce Studies Annual, the Journal of Modern Literature, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and the James Joyce Quarterly, and has given presentations at numerous Joyce conferences.
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  • Teresa CanedaM.TERESA CANEDA CABRERA is an associate professor of English at the University of Vigo in Galicia (Spain) where she teaches 20th Century Literature in English, Contemporary Irish Literature and Culture, and Literary Translation and develops research as a member of the "Translation and Paratranslation" project. She is the author of La estética modernista como práctica de resistencia en A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (2002) and is currently editing Vigorous Joyce: Atlantic Readings of James Joyce. Her work has appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, Papers on Joyce: The Journal of the James Joyce Spanish Society and Atlantis: The Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies. She sits on the Editorial Board of Viceversa, the journal of the Association of Galician Translators and has also published translations from the work of English modernists into the Galician language. Recent publications include "Translation as Neutralization: Indeterminacies and Ambivalences in 'Clay'" in Bosinelli Bollettieri, Rosa Maria and Ira Torresi eds., Joyce and/in Translation. (Roma: Bulzoni, 2007), "The Untranslatability of Modernism" in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska eds., Modernism. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007) 'The Loveliness Which Has Not Yet Come Into the World': Translation�as a Revisitation of Joyce's (Irish) Modernism" in Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton eds., Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
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  • Ron EwartRON EWART lectured for many years at the University of St Gallen. He has also been a long-term member of the Z�rich James Joyce Foundation. He is an expert on modern poetry and an authority on Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
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  • Paul FaganPAUL FAGAN is an Irish-born academic and writer. He first became interested in Joyce academically while studying under Fritz Senn in Zürich James Joyce Center in 2001, and has since been primarily interested in applying Senn's methods to Finnegans Wake in order to discover not so much what the text means, but rather how it means. His paper "Meeting That Kind Of a Being With a Difference: Hamlet and the allusive method in Finnegans Wake" was presented at the XXIst International James Joyce Symposium in Tours France in 2008, and will be published in an upcoming collection of essays on Shakespeare and Joyce, edited by Laura Pelaschiar. In February 2009 he presented his paper " 'Forget, Remember! Forget!': the Metamorphic Influence of Memory and Amnesia in 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' " at the Italian Joyce Foundation's post-graduate conference. Under the pseudonym, Oswald J. Healy, Paul has written a number of plays for the Irish stage, including "Brazen Bulls" (2006), and "With Wandering Steps and Slow" (2007), as well as a new translation of Georg Buechner's "Woyzeck" (2005). Paul is currently doing research at the University of Vienna, Austria, where is the co-founder of the Vienna Finnegans Wake reading group.
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  • Ljiljana Ina GjurgjanLJILJANA INA GJURGJAN is a full professor of English literature at the University of Zagreb, Croatia and a principal researcher on the project The Articulation of National Identity in Croatian, Irish and some Other Anglophone Literatures. Previously she has taught in Slavonic Departments at University of Michigan, Yale University (visiting scholar Fulbright grants) and University of London (British Council grant) She has co-organized a course at IUC Dubrovnik (with Morton Levitt) International James Joyce, 2004 and co-convened two panels on Irish literature at ESSE conferences (2000, 2006). She has published two book long comparative studies in Croatian: Kamov and early Joyce (1984) and The National and the Mythical in the Works of Vladimir Nazor and W.B Yeats (1995) and co-edited a collection of essays on reception of Joyce and Yeats in Croatia and postcolonial theory Irish Mirror for Croatian Literature (2008). Currently she is completing a book on the Methods of Reading. She has also presented and/or published a number of papers both in English and Croatian on theory of literature, women's writing and Irish literature (Joyce, Yeats), the most important ones on Joyce in English being: "'More Mud, More Crocodiles' � The Turn in the Portrait's Aestheticism", 18th International James Joyce Symposium, Trieste 2002, published Studia romanica et anglica zagrabiensia, No. 47 (2004); "The Symbolic Meaning of a Journey in J. Joyce's Portrait and V. Woolf's To the Lighthouse", Places and Spaces, Delphi, 2003; "Is It Right to Kiss Your Mother or the Return of the Repressed" Dublin, Bloomsday 100, 2004; "Hamlet's Stephen" 21th International James Joyce Symposium, Tours, 2008, "Joyce's Negative Epiphany" Festschrift for Sonja Bašic (forthcoming).
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  • Geert LernoutGEERT LERNOUT teaches English and comparative literature at the University of Antwerp, where he is also director of the James Joyce Centre. He has written books and many articles on Joyce, but also on Friedrich Hölderlin, Bach's Goldberg Variations, the history of the book and most recently the Bible. With Daniel Ferrer and Vincent Deane he is editor of "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo." He is a member of the Academia Europæa.
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  • John McCourtJOHN McCOURT teaches at Università Roma Tre. He is director of the Trieste Joyce School. He is the author of James Joyce: A Passionate Exile (London: Orion Books, and New York: St Martin's Press, 2000) and of The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920. (Dublin: Lilliput Press and Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). An extended Italian version, James Joyce Gli Anni di Bloom was published by Mondadori in 2004 and won the Comisso Price. He has been guest editor of the James Joyce Quarterly and was a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation from 2002 to 2008. He is on the board of the James Joyce Italian Foundation. In February 2009 his edited collection, James Joyce in Context, was published by Cambridge University Press. A short book on literary biography with particular reference to Yeats and Joyce will be published in 2009 by Bulzoni Editore as part of their Piccola Biblioteca Joyceana. In 2007 McCourt was awarded the Cattedrali Europee Prize in Rome for his work in Joyce Studies.
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  • Barry McCreaBARRY McCREA is assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of a novel, The First Verse (Carroll & Graf, 2005; Brandon 2008), and World of Strangers: the New Families of Modern Fiction, which looks at family and form in Joyce, and Proust.
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  • Maria McGarrityMARIA McGARRITY is an Associate Professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. A former managing editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement, she has recently published a monograph, Washed by the Gulf Stream: the Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (Delaware, 2009) and a co-edited collection, Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
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  • Ilaria NataliILARIA NATALI teaches English Literature at the University of Florence, where she has been temporary researcher since 2008. She is particularly interested in genetic approaches to Joyce criticism and completed her PhD on this topic. In 2008, she published two books about Joyce's avant-textes, "That submerged doughdoughty doubleface": Pomes Penyeach di James Joyce (Pisa, ETS) and The Ur-Portrait: "Stephen Hero" e il processo di creazione artistica in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (Firenze, FUP). She has published several other articles and spoken at numerous conferences over the past 7 years.
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  • Laura PelaschiarLAURA PELASCHIAR is programme director of the Trieste Joyce School. She graduated in English language and literature at the University of Trieste with an MA thesis on Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey. In 1994 she completed her PhD at the University of Bologna with a dissertation on the contemporary Northern Irish novel. She has worked as a translator, translating over 50 books for Mondadori, E.Elle Einaudi Ragazzi, Fazi Editore. Her research focuses mainly on the work of James Joyce and the nexus between Joycean texts, the Gothic tradition and Shakespeare. She has published widely on the Northern Irish novel. She teaches English literature and English language.
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  • Thomas J. RiceTHOMAS J. RICE is the author of eight books and over 100 essays, articles, and papers on nineteeth- and twentieth-century British literature, with special emphasis on modern and postmodern fiction. Currently he is working on studies of the contemporary novel of complexity and of the fiction of Iris Murdoch. In 1997 he received both USC's most prestigious award for research, the Educational Foundation Award, and the biennial Iris Murdoch Society Prize for original and creative scholarship. He has lectured widely in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and has received both Fulbright and DAAD Fellowships for teaching and research in Germany (1990, 1992). Professor Rice's most recent book is Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity (University of Illinois Press, 1997).
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  • Fritz SennFRITZ SENN is founder and Director of the Zürich James Joyce Foundation. He has written widely on all aspects of Joyce's work, especially on Joyce and translation and on Joyce's use of Classical literature. His publications include Joyce's Dislocutions, edited by John Paul Riquelme (1984), Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce, edited by Christine O'Neill (1995). A volume of interviews tracing his recollections of his life in the Joyce community, The Joycean Murmoirs, was published in 2007, edited by Christine O'Neill. A German edition of this work, Zerrinnerungen, also appeared in 2007.
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  • Spurgeon ThompsonSPURGEON THOMPSON is Lecturer at CTL College, Limassol, Cyprus. He has published articles on James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, James Connolly, and other Irish writers in Irish Studies Review, Eire-Ireland, The Irish University Review, the International Journal of English Studies, The Irish Journal of Feminist Studies, Cultural Studies, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. He is the editor of the "Irish Cultural Studies" special issue of Cultural Studies (2001) and the March 2008 special issue of Interventions on James Connolly. Further, he has published articles comparing Cypriot and Irish writing, as well as an article "Cyprus After History" in Interventions. He is writing a book on Finnegans Wake and postcolonial studies.
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  • Luke Thurston LUKE THURSTON is a lecturer in 20th Century Literature at the Aberystwyth University in Wales. He teaches teaches modern and contemporary British, Irish and American literature, specializing in the period 1880-1940; and also literary theory, specializing in psychoanalysis. His main research interests are in twentieth century literature (especially Irish modernism), contemporary literature and literary theory, with additional interests in contemporary philosophy and translation studies. He is also very interested in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. He has translated works by Jean Laplanche, André Green and Roberto Harari, and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal for Lacanian Studies. He is the author of James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis, Cambridge University Press, 2004).
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  • Jolanta WawrzyckaJOLANTA WAWRZYCKA is professor of English at Radford University, Virginia, where she teaches literary theory and criticism, Anglo-Irish literature and "Nobel Prize" literature. She also directs a Study Abroad Program "European Literary Trails." She is the editor of Gender in Joyce (Florida UP, 1997, with Marlena Corcoran). Among her other publications are chapters in books on Milan Kundera and Roland Barthes, contributions to JJQ and JJLS, and essays on James Joyce and translation in ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners (ed. Bosinelli and Moser, UP of Kentucky, 1998), A Collideorscape of Joyce (ed. Frehner and Zeller, Lilliput, 1998), Reception of James Joyce in Europe (ed. Lernout and Van Mierlo, Thoemmes 2004), Twenty-First Joyce (ed. Beja and Jones, UP of Florida, 2004), Joyce Studies in Italy (2007), and James Joyce in Context (ed. John McCourt, Cambridge UP, 2008).
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