Gerry Dukes


Gerry Dukes was a lecturer in literature and Research Fellow at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick until 2006. He is now a freelance editor, critic and writer. He is a specialist in the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Having published his annotated edition of Beckett’s postwar novellas, First Love and Other Novellas, Penguin have also published his Illustrated Lives: Samuel Beckett, a copiously illustrated biography of the writer. With the actor Barry McGovern he adapted Beckett’s postwar trilogy of novels as a one-man Beckett show I’ll Go On, which premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1985 and which has become a benchmark for Beckett productions worldwide. He is a regular contributor to journals, magazines and newspapers and has frequently written for television and radio. His most recent play, Thesis (co-written with Paul Meade and David Parnell), was co-produced by the Civic Theatre, Tallaght and Gúna Nua Theatre Company in 2007.



ABSTRACT
From the margins to the centre: James Joyce and the emancipation of the reader

Strategies employed by Joyce across the canon of his work ensure that his readers are involved in decoding and interpretive processes that require levels of active engagement with the texts that are unusual, to say the least. By outlining and examining some of these strategies in action, a case will be made for regarding Joyce as an early exponent of the devolution of textual authority from the readerly writer to the writerly reader. The case will be argued with reference to Dubliners (with particular reference to “The Sisters” and “Two Gallants” where topography is transformed into a kind of mythography, where the streetscape “speaks” to those who are prepared to listen) and to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which the “Simon Moonan effect” will be described and analyzed. Revisions and modulations of these and similar strategies in Ulysses will be discussed and evaluated.