From a discipline spanning millennia, to one just a century old: comparisons between the weight and heft of Homeric scholarship and Joyce criticism would be overdoing it a bit, though might feel reasonable to anyone facing the daunting mountain of critical writing on Joyce's texts. This chapter will not offer a guide to Joyce studies, nor cut through the last fifty years of publications to show what is ‘best’ – but I do want to briefly observe a strange fondness in the field for what is ‘worst’. Joyceans seem to love quacks, pretenders, the misled. Stories of apparently overreaching or ridiculous conference papers are circulated within certain groups at summer schools and symposia, and one pre-eminent Joycean is purportedly even now in the process of collecting Joycean quacks, spoofs, loons: to write a ‘study’ of them. This study will not be representative of the field at large, but its proposed existence is revelatory.

What does this Joycean tendency mean in terms of critical authority? What has happened when one scholar's approach becomes fodder for ridicule? When a reading ‘fails’ in the eyes of the critical mass, it could be due to a lack of authority in the work itself: it could be poorly evidenced, without invocation of the right modes of authority, a weakly made argument lacking enough supporting material to back it up. Or, it could make a claim that is ‘wrong’ in the eyes of the current conglomerate of Joyceans: a confidence that they know that is not what is going on in Joyce's texts. Both options situate authority with the massed critics. The field determines which modes of authorisation are necessary, as it determines what the ‘right sort’ of readings or approaches are. This can lead to a sense of an ‘in crowd’, which is also communicated at conferences, summer schools, workshops, symposia. Newcomers learn a lot about Joyce studies by listening to critical gossip, including which critics hold the power to decide who should be taken seriously or not. An established Joyce scholar might make a running joke about another's mixed metaphors for decades, and somehow the former's joke can overshadow the latter's contributions to the field.

I am not here to decry specialists, or expertise; it is my privilege to respond to other critics of Joyce, and my own readings benefit immeasurably from such interaction.