Please join the James Joyce Society for the latest installment in our Lunchtime Launch Series:

European Joyce Studies, vol. 34:

One Long Blue Streak: Joyce and Swearing

This event will meet over Zoom. Click here for RSVP link.

Hosted by special issue editors Casey Lawrence and Frances Ilmberger,

in conversation with contributors Valérie Bénéjam, Sam Slote, Tímea Mészáros, and Trisevgeni Bilia,

followed by a Q&A/Discussion.  

One Long Blue Streak traces the unstoppable flow of indecent, profane, and off-colour language coursing through James Joyce's work, inviting readers to decode and delight in the bawdry and blasphemy that established Joyce as one of the notoriously obscene writers in the canon. From the elided vulgarity of Dubliners to the anarchic wordplay of Finnegans Wake, Joyce seized upon the power of swearing, cursing, and so-called foul language—sacred, sexual, and scatological alike—to create a playful space in which speech is still free.

Casey Lawrence completed her doctorate in English literature at Trinity College Dublin in 2023. She organised the 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium and coedited the resultant open-access essay collection, Caliban’s Mirror: Reflections of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, a special issue of Open Library of Humanities Journal (2024–25). She has been published in the James Joyce Quarterly, The Modernist Review, Joyce Studies Annual, The James Joyce Literary Supplement, and Joyce Writing Disability (University Press of Florida, 2022).

Frances Ilmberger is a lecturer at the University of Zurich, Switzerland and the archivist of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. Her most recent book is an edited volume Ulysses Polytropos: Essays on James Joyce by Fritz Senn (European Joyce Studies, 2022).

Valérie Bénéjam teaches English literature at Nantes University, France. She has written extensively about Joyce’s work, and coedited several volumes (Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, Cognitive Joyce, and Centripetal Joyce / Joyce Centrifugal). Her new monograph, Joyce’s Theatrical Poetics, was recently published with the University Press of Florida.

Trisevgeni Bilia completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford, UK on the reception of Joyce’s Ulysses in Greece. Her interests include translation studies, world literature, Joyce studies, and modern Greek studies.

Tímea Mészáros is a doctoral researcher at the DFG-Funded Graduate Research Training Unit “Contemporary/Literature” at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her recent publications include “‘Portals and Pebbles’: Fictional Media and the Everyday Digital in the Contemporary Novel” in the essay collection Alltag! (2023), of which she was coeditor, and a paper with Dirk Vanderbeke, “‘The flow of the language it is. The thoughts’: On Time and Thoughts and Movement in Ulysses,” in the James Joyce Quarterly (2021).

Sam Slote is a professor in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is the coauthor of Annotations to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (2022), author of Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (2013), and coeditor of How Joyce Wrote “Finnegans Wake” (2007).