For more than a decade, scholarship on the work of literary giant James Joyce found a home in the Joyce Studies Annual, a premier journal created in 1989 by Thomas Stanley at the University of Texas.
When Stanley retired as editor in 2003, the journal went unpublished for years—that is, until two Fordham English professors and the Fordham University Press picked up the project in 2007 to continue the legacy. Professor of English Philip Sicker and Associate Professor Moshe Gold are now the co-editors of JSA, which pays homage to “the most influential novelist of the 20th century.”
“More than any other 20th-century writer, Joyce shapes our understanding of modern literature,” said Sicker, a Joyce scholar who is working on a book about the visual perception and narrative perspective in Joyce’s Ulysses.
“He is influential not only because of his innovative techniques, which dismantle the conventions of linear narrative and traditional syntax, but because he is preoccupied with the defining concern of modernist fiction, poetry, and drama: the status of the individual self.”
To do justice to the profundity of Joyce’s writings, the new JSA publishes scholarship of significant scope and length (some article are up to 50 manuscript pages), which sets JSA apart from other scholarly journals in the field. In addition, Sicker said, submissions to the journal have become increasingly innovative.
“Recent JSA articles have ranged from explorations of neurology in Finnegans Wake to post-colonial readings of the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses, to feminist interpretations of the story ‘Clay’ from Dubliners,” Sicker said.
Moreover, he said, “We’ve received a greater number of submissions each year since 2007, and a good portion of what we publish is cutting-edge scholarship, including work by distinguished Joyceans such as Joseph Valenti, Margot Norris, and Geert Lernout.”
The eighth edition of JSA will be published this month.
