Call for Abstracts:
ECHO-JOYCE: READING JOYCE IN RELATION
abstracts due August 31, 2026
Joyce Studies Annual invites submissions for a special issue featuring the topic of “Echo-Joyce: Reading Joyce in Relation” to be guest edited by Amadeo De La Pava, Faye Liu, and Jordan Smith.
In Poetics of Relation (1990) Martinician writer and theorist Édouard Glissant says Finnegans Wake “was an écho-monde that was prophetic and consequently absolute (without admission into the real).” Juxtaposing the Wake alongside other examples of “échos-monde” (Bob Marley’s song, Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal theories, Wifredo Lam’s painting, among others) Glissant suggests Joyce’s work is simultaneously unique and exemplary in its relation to other transformative work. Glissant’s vocabulary continues to prove useful in recent scholarship. The “right to opacity” is invoked by Zoe Henry (“Reading (and Loving) Ulysses While Black” [105]) to characterize the hermeneutic difficulties that loving Ulysses while Black involves. Inspired by Glissant’s vision of the écho-monde as both in and limited by relation to other writers, artists, and theorists, this special topic on the echo-worldings of Joyce considers how Joyce and Joyce’s readers, including scholars of Black diasporic studies, articulate visions that mediate the local and the global, favoring movements that flow in multiple directions across time and space. It invites essays that address ways to creolize the practice of reading Joyce. Echoing Glissant’s “Echo-,” we emphasize detours, rather than the return (retour) to Joyce as an origin or center: foregrounding an evasion of enclosure, an archipelagic poetics, and a multiplicity of not only language but also medium and voice. “Echo-Joyce” seeks out a widening community of readers, writers, and scholars attentive to the echoes (or “échos-monde”) of linguistic, narrative, and historical polyphony.
While contributors are welcome to continue a dialogue between Joyce and Glissant, we also welcome proposals for essays that interpret this issue's title of “Echo-Joyce” more broadly. Essays from scholars outside the field of Joyce Studies are welcome and encouraged, as are essays that don’t maintain a sole focus on Joyce’s literary output.
We invite contributors to respond to questions and provocations, including but not limited to:
● How does Joyce echo his literary antecedents? How are Joyce’s echoes important to our understanding of other literatures under colonial domination?
● How does Joyce’s work allow us to conceptualize the relation between Ireland and the Caribbean? between all archipelagic networks?
● How do Joyce’s echoes and relations change how we read issues of ecology and climate crisis?
● How might Joyce’s work resist canonical and colonial capture?
● Analysis of how writers within archipelagic networks echo Joyce
● Theorizations of the field of Joyce Studies and its methodologies as échos-monde
● Studies of Joyce within the echoes of translation and translation studies
● Theorizations of Joyce and Caribbean thought beyond the creole, francophone, or anglophone
Guidelines
Please submit a single PDF containing:
- A brief scholarly bio (approximately 100 words)
- An abstract of 250–300 words
- Submissions should be sent to Jordan Smith (jsmith372@fordham.edu), Faye Liu (fl2@fordham.edu), Amadeo De La Pava (ad151@fordham.edu), and Chris GoGwilt (gogwilt@fordham.edu) with the subject line “Echo-Joyce Submission” by August 31, 2026.
- Notification of abstract decisions will be sent by September 30, 2026.
- Completed articles of 7,000–9,000 words will be due by January 1, 2027.
- Final essays will be subject to peer review prior to publication.
