Nicholas Morris SUNY-Buffalo nmorris@buffalo.edu “Outside His Jurisfiction”: Interrogating Joyce’s Non-Fiction 25 March 2012

James Joyce and the Epistolary Arts: the Jahnke Bequest at the Zürich Joyce Foundation

QUOTATIONS 1. Novels I suppose are pure literature and diaries are pure life. Autobiographies are life, but life that has been adroitly rearranged for the show window. The great books of confession, the Rousseau and the Augustine, are all too few. So that we come back to the great letter writers for the happiest mixture of both. – Thorton Wilder, “On Reading the Great Letter Writers” 2. The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but

the person you are writing to, but which you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those close friends will ever read what we have written.

– T.S. Eliot, “English Poets as Letter Writers” (MS Houghton), cited in Letters of Eliot Vol. I 1898–1922

3. But the curatorial dilemma…illustrates a Foucauldian point that has become fundamental everywhere else in literary-historical criticism: that taxonomies, archives, and other systems of codifying knowledge do not just name things that are visible in advance (from sexualities to illnesses to books); they also, to a certain extent, determine what is visible in the first place.

– Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Invisible Ink”

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4. L’archive, ce n’est pas ce qui sauvegarde, malgré sa fuite immédiate, l’événement de

l’énoncé et conserve, pour les mémoires futures, son état civil d’évadé; c’est ce qui, à la racine même de l’énoncé-événement, et dans le corps où il se donne, définit d’entrée de jeu le système de son énonçabilité. L’archive n’est pas non plus ce qui recueille la poussière des énoncés redevenus inertes et permet le miracle éventuel de leur résurrection; c’est ce qui définit le mode d’actualité de l’énoncé-chose; c’est le système de son fonctionnement.

[The archive is not that which, despite its immediate escape, safeguards the event of

the statement, and preserves, for future memories, its status as an escapee; it is that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability. Nor is the archive that which collects the dust of statements that have become inert once more, and which may make possible the miracle of their resurrection; it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing; it is the system of its functioning.]

– Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir BIBLIOGRAPHY Bowker, Gordon. James Joyce. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010. Print. Brockman, William. “Letters.” James Joyce in Context. Ed. John McCourt. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2009. 27–38. Print. Decker, William Merrill. Epistolary Practices  : Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Print. Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 1, 1898-1922. Ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh

Haughton. Rev. ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Print. Esdale, Logan. “Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and The Space of Letters.” Journal of Modern

Literature 29.4 (2006): 99–123. Print. Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Print.

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Gillespie, Michael Patrick. “The Papers of Joyce: Ethical Questions for Textually Ambivalent Critics.” New Hibernia Review 2.4 (1998): 99–113. Print.

Hayman, David. “A Case for the Re-edition of the Letters.” James Joyce Literary Supplement 4.1

(1990): 24. Print. –––. “What the Unpublished Letters Can Tell Us: Or, Is Any One Watching?” Studies in the

Novel 22 (1990): 187–188. Print.

Joyce, James. The Cats of Copenhagen. Dublin: Ithys Press, 2012. Print. Kermode, Frank, and Anita Kermode, eds. The Oxford Book of Letters. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1995. Print.

Knight, Jeffrey Todd. “Invisible Ink: A Note on Ghost Images in Early Printed Books.” Textual Cultures 5.2 (2010): 53–62. Print.

Nadel, Ira. “Aspern Revisited: The Frustrated Search for Joyce’s Papers and Letters.” Irish

Literary Supplement 8 (1989): 8–9. Print. –––. “Incomplete Joyce.” Joyce Studies Annual 2 (1991): 86–100. Print. –––. “Unriddling the Writing: The ‘Letters of James Joyce’, Volume I.” Joyce Studies Annual 3

(1992): 77–97. Print. O’Connor, Elizabeth Foley. “Review of Janine Utell’s James Joyce and the Revolt of Love:

Marriage, Adultery, Desire.” Joyce Studies Annual 2011: 213–222. Print. Pryor, Felix, ed. The Faber Book of Letters: Letters Written in the English Language 1578-1939.

London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988. Print. Reynolds, Mary. “Joyce as a Letter Writer.” A Companion to Joyce Studies. Ed. Zack Bowen &

James F. Carens. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. 39–70. Print. Richter, Simon. “The Ins and Outs of Intimacy: Gender, Epistolary Culture, and the Public

Sphere.” The German Quarterly 69.2 (1996): 111–124. Print. Saintsbury, George. A Letter Book. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922. Print. Wilder, Thorton. “On Reading the Great Letter Writers.” American Characteristics and Other

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