Title: Rereading Throwaway: A Detritus-Illuminated Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses
“I don’t mind you looking down on me so long as you’re looking at me.”- Dublin Mural Art
As John Eglington, Ulysses’ Scylla and Charybdis Quaker Librarian ‘censured’, “Our young Irish bards...have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside the Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side of idolatry” (U. 9.44-46). Famous as the Black 47’s statistical dead, the Irish were regarded globally as human landfill, and lacked the literary leader, a “Shakespeare,” who could shape the narrative of national identity. Joyce, as Stephen Dedalus, the unrecognized artist, feels discarded.
My reading of Ulysses, (Irish emphasis on the “you”), however, repurposes the detritus created through diaspora and lack of recognition, as an identity itself: a voluminous 200-page bricolage notebook guide to James Joyce's Ulysses, richly illuminated with materials others had thrown away. Bread Loaf School of English Director Emily Bartels described the guide as a "revolution in textual Hermeneutic analysis in a creative-interpretation-art piece of James Joyce's Ulysses." This project celebrates the joy in Joyce, appreciating the interplay of text, image, the ephemeral with the classic, and the lost or revised morsels found when reading and rereading Joyce. It is a living homage to Joyce’s unbounded artistic mode. Whether one thinks of Ulysses as trash, disposable, pornography, or unparalleled genius, do not discard it.