Julie McCormick Weng: “James Joyce’s Encounter with Sexual Harassment”

In-person at New York Tech and livestreamed for our out-of-town members. RSVP coming soon.

James Joyce’s short story, “An Encounter,” depicts the lives of two boys on a day when they skip school and are confronted by a sexual predator. In published manuscripts and correspondence, Joyce and his brother Stanislaus claimed that the events in the story were based upon their “actual personal experience,” and they would write about their memories of the predatory man. If the fictionalized encounter represents the nature of the real one, then the children were victim-survivors of a form of non-contact sexual abuse. Today we would describe this abuse as an act of sexual harassment and the exploitation of children. The Joyce brothers’ claim is rarely acknowledged in scholarship or footnotes to critical editions of Dubliners. This presentation will argue that their experience must be brought into the central discourse of the text; for “An Encounter” tells us a story about Joyce and his time as well as a story about us and our time. Joyce’s troubled efforts to get the story published and the varied reception of his claim of having met the predator himself share relevant connections to the way that we assess and respond to the testimonies of victim-survivors today, including the authenticity and significance of those testimonies. His experience also prompts scholars to consider how to ethically approach fictionalized representations of sexual harassment in literature, such as the one depicted in “An Encounter.” Joyce’s short story is not a testimony but a creative rendering of a biographical event. With this challenging context in mind, this presentation will provide methodologies for researching and teaching “An Encounter,” while also developing an ethics for placing the story alongside Joyce’s biography.

Julie McCormick Weng is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University. She has published widely on Irish modernism and has coedited two volumes, including Race in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024), with Malcolm Sen; and Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (Syracuse University Press, 2019), with Kathryn Conrad and Cóilín Parsons.

In-person event. No RSVP needed.

For a hundred years now, Joyce and his corpus have furnished Latin American artists with structures capable of organizing difficult local experiences, and of translating those experiences into forms that are internationally recognizable. In an effort to emphasize both the vitality and complexity of Joyce’s legacy in Latin America, I argue that the Mexican novelist Gustavo Saínz (Mexico City, 1940-Bloomington, Indiana 2015) invokes the Joycean novel in a contestory fashion, as a challenge to hegemonic discourses that have misrepresented key aspects of the history and lived experience of Mexican subjects. After providing an overview of Latin American reception of Joyce and the tensions that surround that reception, in the first part of my talk I will focus on how Saínz’s 1968 comic novel Obsessive Circular Days depicts the phenomenon of reading Ulysses in Mexico City in the 1960s. In the second part of my talk, I turn to Saínz’s 1981 novel Aztec Ghosts: A Pre-Text. The catalyst for the novel was one of the major archaeological discoveries of 20th-century Mexico: the accidental uncovering of the Coyolxauhqui monolith in Mexico City in 1978, followed by the discovery of the Huēyi Teōcalli, the Great Temple of the Mexica people’s capital city Tenochtitlan. In my reading, the pages of Aztec Ghosts represent a site of confluence between Mexican archaeology and Finnegans Wake. Through his novelization of this archaeological discovery and the public response it generated, in Aztec Ghosts Sainz draws on Wakean forms and themes in order to challenge the authoritarian Mexican government’s reductive, romanticized depictions of the country's precolonial past. 

Casey Drosehn Gough (B.A. Williams College, PhD Northwestern University) is a Senior Lecturer of English at North Central College in Naperville, IL. She studies Modernisms and the Global Avant-Garde from a Latin Americanist perspective, and has published on Surrealism, World Cinema, Roberto Arlt, and on Odiseo, Marcelo Zabaloy's lipogram translation of Ulysses. Her current research focuses on the Latin American reception of James Joyce. With Federico Barea, she has translated works by Néstor Sánchez and William Burroughs, as well as The Criminalization of Democratic Politics in the Global South, with a foreword by Lula da Silva. She is also working on an adaptation of Ulysses set in present-day Chicagoland, an episode of which is forthcoming in the James Joyce Quarterly. 

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

Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Barry Devine and Ellen Scheible

This event will meet over Zoom. RSVP link to come.

Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century presents examples of bold, innovative pedagogical techniques instructors have used to adapt the study of Joyce’s work for the contemporary classroom. Leading Joyce scholars share approaches that go beyond the traditional university lecture hall to include experiences teaching high school students, senior citizens, art students, book club members, and people in prisons.
 
The strategies in this inspirational volume range from class discussions to creating art and music to walking city streets. Works examined include the complex Finnegans Wake and the influential modernist milestones Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While Joyce is often viewed as an essential and foundational author of Irish literature, contributors to this volume argue that the spirit of Joyce’s writing is global, and they offer suggestions for teaching these works in an international context. 
 
Students are often daunted by the perceived difficulty and inaccessibility of Joyce, but this volume helps both new and experienced teachers of Joyce make the writer’s texts understandable, relatable, and even fun. These authors argue that reading Joyce helps develop skills in holding and interrogating opposing ideas, skills that are essential in navigating the modern academic and political landscape. In grappling with Joyce, students will recognize his writing as relevant and urgent.