Abstract

Coping With Joyce: Essays From the Copenhagen Symposium may or may not help its readers to cope effectively with James Joyce, but its eighteen essays certainly provide an insight into myriad coping means, techniques, and strategies that Joycean critics employ. Beja and Benstock's excellent Introduction - as helpful and insightful as all but the very best essays in this book - examines the most common critical approaches to Joyce and the attendant problems: from the veneration of Joyce, through the exploitation of Joyce, to the intent to "master" Joyce. The Introduction also points out "a discernible change in Joyce studies," the increasing focus on Finnegans Wake, partially because of "new theoretical approaches," and partly because critics have realized that the Wake can serve to illuminate Joyce's other works. No doubt this has also come about because the decades-long communal effort to make Ulysses accessible has succeeded to the point of diminishing returns: critical quibbles over Ulysses are increasingly minor. As the introduction says of Joyce, "he shows himself as a pedagogue of self-instruction providing the means by which his readers teach themselves how to read the texts." His readers now seem ready to teach themselves to read Finnegans Wake