Who Reads Ulysses? (Studies in Major Literary Authors) Book

A book that is at once obscure and brilliant, Ulysses was declared the most important book of the twentieth century. It has also been the center of controversy off and on for over 75 years, most recently as the object of what was dubbed 'The Joyce Wars' in the late nineteen-eighties: the controversy over Hans Walter Gabler's Ulysses: The Corrected Text . The author examines the Joyce Wars as a fascinating nexus of the conflicts between scholars and ordinary readers, and one that illuminates the existence of Ulysses - and by extension, Joyce - as an example of of Lyotard's differend , an icon that exists simultaneously in two separate yet contradictory discourses, each of which silences the other. The Academic Joyce is radically different from the Public Joyce, and yet neither could exist without the other. Tangled up in this conflicted space are the interests of the common reader, a nebulously defined entity if there ever was one. Those interests were ostensibly addresses by Danis Rose with his Ulysses: A Reader's Edition in 1997, which sparked yet another episode in the Joyce Wars. What the continuing controversies illustrate is the strange relationship between academics, readers and editors, a relationship that needs further examination. This study calls for us to look not only at questions of authorship raised by editorial theory, but to look carefully at who reads Ulysses and why they read it. Such an investigation can provide us with fruitful ways to explore the subversive nature of text for readers, both in and out of the academy.Read More