Penelope K. Wade: A Detritus-Illuminated Guide to Ulysses

This project in two volumes celebrates the joy in Joyce, especially appreciating the interplay of text, image, and the lost or revised morsels when reading, and rereading Joyce. It is a viewer's guide to being audience to James Joyce's works, one's correspondence as reader, reader-as-text-operator, and reader-as-artist.

Also (AND! AND! AND!), I would like to speak to the democratization of this artistic process, to the self as reader, and remind the crowd that in Ireland, the emphasis Ulysses is on the "you".

In prose, the guide is a rich tapestry and chimera: part extensive letter to my wandering father in Dublin that self-same summer, part heavy lifting textual analysis, part flaneur tour guide highlighting personal and favourite haunts in the text, part epic simile and epic form with several strata of micro and macro narratives; each episode strives to emulate Joyce's narrative shifts and allusions and secondary schemata symbolism. Bread Loaf School of English's President Emily Bartels 2015 commencement description of it testifies to its commodious elusiveness for summation, "a revolution in textual Hermeneutic analysis in a creative-interpretation-art piece of James Joyce's Ulysses". A bricolage encrusted notebook, richly illuminated with "throwaway" (id est Postcards from a bin in the Social Studies department of my school (marked "throw out"), advertisements, wrappers, junk mail, promotional materials, coffee shoppe literature, and even a discarded Library copy of Joyce's Ulysses, to name a few sources), deepens ontological/paleontological levels for unpacking this inexhaustible novel . Whether one thinks of Ulysses as trash, disposable, pornography, or unparalleled genius, one should not turn away from it, nor [no more] 'turn aside and brood'.

Illuminating the Gesamtkunstwerk: a guide to the guide if you will. Explanations and receptions.

In Joyce Society member, and UVA/Santa Barbara faculty member Jennifer's Wicke’s Summer 2015 Bread Loaf School of English Ulysses course, my (affectionately-referred-to) 'madness' became manifest. I would like to thank Jennifer for all her support throughout this neverending process.

My presentation to the North American James Joyce Conference, Diasporic Joyce Toronto, was subsequently published in the 2017 Bread Loaf Journal (Volume IV. pp.100-108). Highlighting how Throwaway can illustrate Joyce’s philosophies on time, genius, art, and the Protean nature of reading, and rereading.

"This is an exquisite project that enchants as it illuminates. I'd go further: I see a future for this, or envision one, as a publication, or a merger of performance piece and exhibition, a sui generis circumnavigation of Ulysses that embraces it as interrogation, dialectic, translation, decorative object, idee fixe, emotional map, historic core sample, a music to be played, a path to be trodden. I cannot begin to encompass its richness, its sly delights, its imaginative leaps, its interplay-- so very Joycean-- between the cute, the homespun, the celestial, the dark portal. I am touched by it literally, and by its phenomenological beauty. I hope to see more radiant pages, but most especially to urge that this memory palace of a notebook see other eyes than those than your parent in reading, and partner in life, and dog Persephone too. With no little awe, Jennifer."

- Jennifer Wicke of “Joyce and Consumer Culture” Cambridge Companion to James Joyce