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Dublin's Joyce: Mapping Joyce Studies

sistent thread in all of their studies is the sense of déjà vu that Kenner’s work produces, and, if for no other reason than to remind us of our intellectual antecedents, it is a good policy to revisit periodically such criticism. Of course, these young critics do more than that. David Gardiner’s essay presents a thoughtful and enthusiastic recapitulation of the structure of Dublin’s Joyce. In language that celebrates Kenner’s impact on Joyce criticism, Gardiner gives a good overview of Dublin’s Joyce. It respectfully acknowledges the debt that current readers owe to Kenner’s early work, and at the same time sets the book in critical perspective. Lauren Onkey’s assessment takes a more edgy tone. With an eye toward current trends in critical thinking, she raises useful questions about the interpretive limitations that contemporary readers, unaccustomed to Kenner’s style and unsympathetic to his epistemology, will find in Dublin’s Joyce. That is not to say that Onkey simply dismisses Kenner’s early work, for she gives a balanced sense of its continuing value within the historical perspective that she assumes. Joseph Kelly begins with an account of first meeting Kenner, and then goes on to show how the personal and the public always coalesce. Using an allusion to Chapman’s Homer as a subtle evocation of Keats’s exuberance, Kelly nicely captures the enthusiasm that Kenner can evoke, but he does more than simply venerate an older critic. With a deft understanding of how context always informs comprehension, Kelly underscores the significant impact that Kenner’s writing had and still has upon Catholic readers of Joyce. Without succumbing to parochialism, Kelly deftly illustrates the way subjective concerns inform broad interpretive endeavors. These essays are critiques, not paeans. Their strength lies in their determination neither to flatter Kenner nor to dismiss him. Rather, each critic pays him the compliment of taking his work seriously, and in doing so each offers us useful reasons why we should as well.