THE PERPETUAL CONTEMPORARY: JOYCE AND US

This introduction proposes a shift from earlier anxieties about Joyce’s belatedness to a renewed sense of his critical immediacy. The essays in the volume show how Joyce speaks to contemporary concerns—ethical, ecological, political, pedagogical, and transnational—through studies of nonhuman bodies, ageing, music and belief, improvisation, Orientalism, violence, friendship, and wartime satire. Moving across Ulysses, Dubliners, Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s early criticism, and his song “Dooleysprudence”, the collection presents Joyce as a living interlocutor whose works inhabit the present, enabling readers to become his true contemporaries.