TLRH | “Caliban’s Mirror”: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium
Thursday, 5 May, 9am – Saturday, 7 May 2022, 4pm 
The event is organised by the School of English of Trinity College Dublin and kindly supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub. This three-day in-person conference, May 5-7,will host speakers that bring these two Irish writers together in innovative ways.
About:
In June 1906, James Joyce wrote to his publisher Grant Richards, who suggested changes to Dubliners for mitigating the text’s supposed ‘indecency’, “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.” Joyce’s metaphor recalls the popular Wildean aphorism, first published in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban at seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.” From Caliban’s mirror in Dorian Gray to Stephen Dedalus’s “cracked lookingglass of a servant” in Ulysses and everything in between, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, both voluntary exiles from Ireland, are reflections of each other, of Dublin, and of a particular moment in Irish writing and history. Separately, they are two of the best-known writers to come out of Ireland; together, they paint a portrait of Ireland’s literary history and influence generations of writers to come.
Never before has there been an academic conference on the relationship between these two Irish writers. Perhaps even more startling to those familiar with ‘the Joyce industry’ will be the knowledge that there has never been an edited collection of essays on Joyce and Wilde. Dozens of volumes Joyce Studies appear every year, many of which are ‘Joyce and ____’ books; we’ve seen Beckett and Joyce, Shaw and Joyce, Derrida and Joyce, Joyce and Aquinas, Joyce and Lacan, Joyce et Mallarmé, Vico and Joyce, Joyce and Jung, Virgil and Joyce, Joyce/Shakespeare, Joyce/Foucault, Re: Joyce’n Beckett… the list goes on. So why not Joyce and Wilde?
For more details, see: https://wildejoyce2022.wordpress.com/
Registration through eventbrite is essential: here
Campus Location: Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute
Accessibility: Yes
Room: Neill Lecture Theatre
Event Category: Conferences
Type of Event: One-time event
Audience: Researchers, Postgrad, Alumni, Faculty & Staff, Public
Contact Name: Casey Lawrence
Contact Email: wildejoyce2022@gmail.com
