Who Reads Ulysses?: The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common Reader

Julie Sloan Brannon 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 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 independently. Tangled up in this conflicted space are the interests of the common reader, a nebulously defined entity, and the continuing controversies illustrate the strange relationship between academics, readers, and editors. Who Reads Ulysses? 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. This volume provides fruitful ways to explore the subversive nature of text for readers, both in and out of the academy.