Ode to Joyce

This June Buffalo will host the North American James Joyce Conference, a six-day symposium held very other year that draws Joyce scholars from around the world. Arriving in time for Bloomsday, June 16, scholars and Joyce enthusiasts will coordinate conference activities with civic events throughout the city.

Earler this month the John R. Oishei Foundation awarded the Eire on the Erie Committee, the conference’s organizing body, a $30,000 grant.

Mark Shechner, a University at Buffalo professor and co-chairman of the Eire on the Erie Committee, says the Buffalo event will be different from previous NAJJ conferences, which have been held in Charleston, Tulsa, Berkeley, Ithaca, and Austin. “All other North American James Joyce conferences that I have ever been to have been just that: academic conferences, usually held on university campuses,” Shechner says. “The first thing we did was move the conference out of the university and bring it downtown, so that the visiting scholars can discover and use and enjoy the city of Buffalo.

“We intend to show the city off, having walking tours of downtown and the mansions and an evening bus trip to Niagara Falls.”

Events will be held at the new Burchfield-Penny Art Center and at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, showcasing both the most recent addition to and the long-standing eminence of Buffalo’s cultural community. This year’s conference runs concurrently with the Allentown Art Festival, as well.

“Things have become too business-like at the symposium,” says Laurence Shine, co-chair of the Eire on the Erie Committee, one of the founders of Bloomsday Buffalo, and a Buffalo State professor. “Its time to make it more celebratory.”

Shechner says the conference aims to attract more than 250 Joyce scholars from all over the world. “I mean the world,” he says. “Georgia, Qatar, Fiji, Iran, Korea. There are Joyceans everywhere.”

Shine recalls that when he was a garduate student at the University at Buffalo, between 1975 and 1978, Joyce was big. “Buffalo, back then, was a hive of Joyce activity,” he says. “Our aim is to re-establish Buffalo as the center of the Joyce universe.”

Buffalo was chosen as the site of the NAJJ conference because of the extensive collection of James Joyce manuscripts and memorabilia hosted by the Poetry and Rare Books Room of the UB Library. “No Joyce holdings at any other place can hold a candle to it,” Shechner says. The collection will be on display at UB’s Anderson gallery both during and after the conference.

The conference begins the day before Bloomsday, June 16. On Bloomsday, visiting scholars will join in Buffalo’s annual celebration of Joyce’s Ulysses, including readings, re-enacments, period dress, and other events.

“To use a Joycean term from Finnegans Wake, the whole thing should be a great ‘funferall,’” says Shechner.

—justin sondel