Reviewing Finnegans Wake when it appeared in 1939, The Irish Times declared it “Endlessly Exciting in its Impenetrability”— a proper Irish backhand, that. The apparent inevitability of hyperbole when it comes to discussions of that book is a subject perhaps worthy of a study of its own, but in this book, the emphasis is on how endlessly exciting Joyce's works are in their permeability: there is no single royal road by which one enters, but rather countless unexpected, obscure, and unlikely pathways for readers to discover and attempt— and which lead to just as many and varying degrees of enlightenment, dissatisfaction, amusement, and irritation.

The loose organizing principle to this collection of essays is the illustration of the available variety of critical approaches to Joyce's works, of which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are here given the most attention. I hope that readers will find the absence of any grand and overarching thesis as refreshing as I did in assembling this book. What freedoms this offers the reader— not having to read the whole thing straight through, or even read the essays in the order presented— may well appeal to readers of Joyce, whose otherwise daunting enormities likewise allow their readers set their own pace and choose their own paths.

In recent years, I have taken to concluding a semester-long seminar on Ulysses first by congratulating the students on their achievement in having helped one another to read this notoriously complex book and then by making an unexpected and utterly unfair demand: going around the room, I ask each of them what Ulysses is about— what they would tell their mother or boyfriend or roommate who might ask such a question— and to make things worse, I limit their answer to a single word, and prohibit the repetition of answers. What this exercise reveals is the startling variety of possible answers. My students have offered as answers both grand and sometimes abstract concepts (life, reality, time, thought) and, more often, particular phenomena (grief, movement, fatherhood, marriage, memory).