Reading as Revelation: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

According to Derek Attridge in his illuminating discussion, ‘Reading Joyce’, ‘[f]ar more people read Joyce than are aware of it’. In advancing this claim, Attridge is not being perverse: he is simply acknowledging the scale of Joyce’s impact on so many aspects of twentieth-century culture. Given ‘the ubiquity of [Joyce’s] influence’, Attridge goes on to argue, ‘[t]here is a sense, therefore, in which we can never read Joyce “for the first time”’. Attridge continues:

If we can never read Joyce’s works for the first time (though our pleasure may be enhanced if we always do our best to approach them with open minds), we can also never come to the end of our reading of them.