Between 11 and 16 June 2018, the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Manuscript Genetics will host the 26th International James Joyce Symposium in the city that Joyce and his family visited in the summer of 1926. Belgium is small, so much so that all of the sites Joyce toured that year (Ostend, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and, most importantly, Waterloo) are within a 100-kilometre radius of the conference venue.
In his earliest prose writings, James Joyce described himself as an artist. His brother Stanislaus’s diary and Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography reinforced this image of Joyce as the lone and dedicated creator who was prepared to give up everything for his art. We interpret the title of this conference as both an objective and a subjective genitive – from Joyce’s aesthetic or artistry to pictures of Cork in cork frames – and as a reminder of Joyce’s long afterlife in the creative arts. We want to explore the role of art as a socially constructed commodity in Joyce’s work as well as trace his fortunes in the fine art and rare book marketplace; we invite studies of the ways in which Joyce crafted his oeuvre, in the wake of The Art of James Joyce, A. Walton Litz’s pioneering study of the creation of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; and we are also interested in contributions that, creatively or critically, address the impact of Joyce’s artist persona and work on other artists, in various forms and different mediums.
The deadline for paper or panel proposals will be 1 March 2018. Information about proposals and more can be found at http://uahost.uantwerpen.be/joyce2018.