Volume 24, Number 16 · October 13, 1977
Joyce's Influenza
By Michael Wood
James Joyce in Padua
edited by Louis Berrone
Random House, 128 pp., $10.00
Afterjoyce: Studies in Fiction After Ulysses
by Robert Martin Adams
Oxford University Press, 201 pp., $10.00
"In the wake of the Wake"
edited by Elliott Anderson, edited by David Hayman
Triquarterly 38, 256 pp., $3.50
The Consciousness of Joyce
by Richard Ellmann
Oxford University Press, 150 pp., $10.95
In April 1912, hard up as usual, tired of eking out a precarious living in Trieste, James Joyce went to Padua to take a series of examinations which would qualify him as a teacher of English in Italy. He received very high marks for his performance—421 out of a possible 450—but his scheme for settling down foundered when the Italian government refused to recognize his Irish degree. In the course of his examinations, Joyce wrote two essays, one in Italian on 'L'influenza letteraria universale del rinascimento' and another in English on 'The Centenary of Charles Dickens.' Louis Berrone, a professor of English at Fairfield University, has found these essays in the archives of the University of Padua and now prints them for the first time, adding an introduction, a translation of the Italian essay, a letter from Joyce saying he intends to appear when he is supposed to, a record of Joyce's marks in the separate examinations, a great deal of desultory and pedestrian commentary, and a note on the examiner's squiggles and corrections on Joyce's Italian script. James Joyce in Padua is not so much a book as a sequence of (unsuccessful) strategies for making seven or eight lightweight pages look like an archaeological find.
Review, 4575 words
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