“Fr. Joyce preferred to spend most of his life ‘walking with the excluded.’ Those walks took him into psychiatric wards, a dangerous parish in Kingston, Jamaica, and into the prisons of Northern Ireland, where he reassured isolated, suffering prisoners that God had not forgotten them,” wrote Geoffrey Cobb, a former colleague. “He also served as chaplain in the Tombs, the notorious prison on Lower Manhattan, as well as working with runaway kids and former prostitutes at New York City Covenant House. … Fr. Jim blessed us all by spending a lifetime of giving and never counting the costs.” 

Father Joyce was born on Aug. 22, 1945, to John and Marie (O’Dea Joyce) in Brooklyn. After graduating from Regis High School in Manhattan, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1963. Twelve years later, he was ordained to the priesthood. Father Joyce spent decades of his life in service—as a prison chaplain at Rikers Island, as president of “New Jersey’s Jesuit high school,” and in positions of service beyond the tristate area, including West Africa and Jamaica. 

At Fordham, Father Joyce was an integral part in building the Bronx Irish History Project, a collection of interviews with Irish American members of the Bronx. Father Joyce had previously worked for peace, social justice, and reconciliation in Ireland in the 1970s. 

“Fr. Joyce had a profound love for Ireland and all its people, which I saw throughout our many discussions with the people we interviewed for Fordham’s Bronx Irish Oral History Project,” wrote Cobb, who is BIHP’s research director. “Though Fr. Joyce was dealing with pain from chemotherapy and stage three cancer, he brought humor, warmth, and great stories to our discussions of the Irish in the Bronx.”

Father Joyce also served as superior of Murray-Weigel Hall, a home for retired Jesuits at the Rose Hill campus, from 2009 to 2012. A year ago, he reflected on his time at Murray-Weigel. Father Joyce spent his final years of life in the home that he once led. 

“May he now rest from his labors in peace with Jesus whom he served so very well,” reads his full obituary from the U.S.A. East Province of the Society of Jesus.

Fordham professors of English Philip Sicker, Ph.D.,, and Moshe Gold, Ph.D. co-edit a Joyce Studies Annual, a collection of essays by foremost scholars and emerging voices in the field. The collection was originally a University of Texas Press publication, but has since been revived at Fordham University Press.

The advisory board of Joyce Studies Annual consists of 35 international scholars. In past volumes the collection has included a multitude of articles, with topics and titles such as “A Wakean Whodunit: Death and Authority in Finnegan’s Wake” and “1904: A Space Odyssey”. These annual volumes have created a vast, accessible resource for interested scholars and students alike.

In 2007 when the collection was moved to Fordham, Sicker and Gold took over at the helm. The two were determined to appeal to a broader audience; now included in the collection are essays more accessible to undergraduate students and non-academics, said Sicker. “Over the past ten years, we have, I think, managed to strike a balance between demanding, cutting-edge scholarship and essays of broader interest,” he wrote.

It’s the “inexhaustible nature of Joyce’s work” that motivates Sicker to co-edit this collection each year. He believes Joyce “accommodates each new critical perspective” and so remains relevant over time. Even his earlier Dubliners stories continue to inspire fervent debate in the field, while denser texts like Finnegan’s Wake have been decoded further and further still in the years since its publication in 1939.

And let’s not forget, he added, that as Joyce was writing the novel, his own eyes were failing.

“It’s interesting that someone who is so sight-challenged should write a novel in which so much depends upon visual perception,” Sicker said.

Sicker explores this idea in Joyce’s Spectacles: Sight, Perspective and Representation in Ulysses, his newly completed book that culminates 10 years of effort. “It’s been Joyce saturation,” he joked—in that time he’s also written articles about Joyce, delivered scholarly papers on the author, and co-edited Joyce Studies Annual, which he and fellow Fordham English professor Moshe Gold, PhD, restarted in 2007 after a four-year lapse in its publication.

If any writer can command that kind of sustained study, it’s Joyce, whose famously byzantine and challenging Ulysses is widely thought to be one of the greatest novels of all time.

“When you enter it, you find yourself absolutely immersed in that self-contained, self-bounded textual world” that unfolds within a single day in June 1904, Sicker said. “Although the novel points outside itself in a million different ways, it also has a kind of internal system of reference that makes it endlessly fascinating and intricate.”

He said the book reflects Joyce’s longstanding preoccupation with visual themes, which showed up in his earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When Joyce was writing Ulysses, beginning in 1914, his already weak sight worsened due to cataracts and iritis, a serious and painful disease that later required numerous surgeries.

And yet Ulysses is stocked with a multitude of visual references and metaphors: In places, the act of seeing is filtered through visual modes of the day like dioramas and silent films, Sicker said. In the “Proteus” episode, one of Joyce’s two main characters, Stephen Dedalus, is “trying to affirm reality beyond what he regards as the unreliable nature of sight,” invoking the epistemology of Enlightenment philosophers Bishop George Berkeley and John Locke.

“So you’ve got Joyce, in evoking and narrativizing sight, drawing on everything from medieval theology to 18^th-century philosophy to technologies of the visible in the 19th and 20th centuries,” Sicker said.

The act of seeing is central to many scenes, including one that hinges on a main character, Leopold Bloom, gazing voyeuristically at a young woman exposing her undergarments as she leans back on a seaside boulder. Others are more poignant, as when Dedalus and Bloom lock eyes in the climactic “Ithaca” chapter in a sort of “visual understanding of one another that goes beyond ordinary, subjective ways of seeing,” Sicker said.

In another episode, “Wandering Rocks,” Joyce describes the movements and interactions of various characters around Dublin in a way that echoes the then-prominent futurist painting style, in which a sense of motion is created by shadowy representations of objects in multiple places, he said. And the concept of failing vision surfaces in the “Cyclops” episode, Sicker noted, when Bloom encounters a bigot who is not only “blinded” by hatred and prejudice but also can’t see very well because he’s intoxicated.

“In the novel, Joyce is acutely aware of failed vision or distorted vision,” Sicker said.

He was aware of it outside the novel too. After a number of operations on his eyes, he was going blind by the time Ulysses was published in 1922, Sicker said. He noted that by the time Joyce started writing his later novel, Finnegans Wake, his sight had deteriorated so much that he had to dictate to an amanuensis, the renowned writer Samuel Beckett (who dutifully included the words “come in” when Joyce said them in response to a knock at the door).

Joyce’s vision problems brought him tremendous anguish, Sicker said. “It was tragic [for]someone who was so engaged with the world visually, and who was so interested in the way we see and how we see.”

As he begins contacting university presses to seek publication of Joyce’s Spectacles, Sicker is starting to write a book on The Decalogue, a series of 10 interrelated films by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski that offer oblique meditations on the Ten Commandments. Like Ulysses, The Decalogue “is also a self-contained world,” Sicker said. “I guess I’m drawn to that.”

He’s also helping to manage another sort of immersive experience, this one aimed at Fordham faculty members.

Fordham’s faculty exchange with Ghent University, in Belgium, was launched in the late 1980s by Sicker and a Belgian professor, Kristian Versluys, whom he met during his tour as a Fulbright lecturer. After a hiatus of about nine years, it was restarted five years ago; this fall, linguistics professor Stef Slembrouck, PhD, will come from Ghent to teach at Rose Hill, and Fordham English professor Edward Cahill, PhD, will go to Ghent to teach in the spring. The exchange has traditionally involved professors of English, but will quite possibly expand to include related disciplines, Sicker said.

Teaching in Belgium, Sicker had “eye-opening” cross-cultural experiences, like Belgian universities’ end-of-term assemblies where professors read students’ final grades aloud, prompting reactions that ranged from joyous to devastated. He has participated in the Ghent exchange twice, and found it interesting to see Belgium’s different educational practices, like the greater emphasis placed on lecture rather than in-class discussion.

“In some ways it makes me appreciate aspects of the pedagogical norms that we have at Fordham,” he said. “And in other ways it makes me aware that we could learn things from them.”

When Stanley retired as editor in 2003, the journal went unpublished for years—that is, until two Fordham English professors and the Fordham University Press picked up the project in 2007 to continue the legacy. Professor of English Philip Sicker and Associate Professor Moshe Gold are now the co-editors of JSA, which pays homage to “the most influential novelist of the 20th century.”

“More than any other 20th-century writer, Joyce shapes our understanding of modern literature,” said Sicker, a Joyce scholar who is working on a book about the visual perception and narrative perspective in Joyce’s Ulysses.

“He is influential not only because of his innovative techniques, which dismantle the conventions of linear narrative and traditional syntax, but because he is preoccupied with the defining concern of modernist fiction, poetry, and drama: the status of the individual self.”

To do justice to the profundity of Joyce’s writings, the new JSA publishes scholarship of significant scope and length (some article are up to 50 manuscript pages), which sets JSA apart from other scholarly journals in the field. In addition, Sicker said, submissions to the journal have become increasingly innovative.

“Recent JSA articles have ranged from explorations of neurology in Finnegans Wake to post-colonial readings of the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses, to feminist interpretations of the story ‘Clay’ from Dubliners,” Sicker said.

Moreover, he said, “We’ve received a greater number of submissions each year since 2007, and a good portion of what we publish is cutting-edge scholarship, including work by distinguished Joyceans such as Joseph Valenti, Margot Norris, and Geert Lernout.”

The eighth edition of JSA will be published this month.

Friday, March 11, 2011 | 7:30 p.m.
Lowenstein Center | 12th-Floor Lounge
Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus
Free and Open to the Public

Joyce, Crane, and Fordham University Press

This event is held in collaboration with Fordham’s Poet’s Out Loud program and will (as all Voices Up events do) feature live readings of the texts set to music. This year’s event commemorates the publication, by Fordham University Press, of the first critical edition of Hart Crane’s epic of America, The Bridge, edited by Lawrence Kramer, professor of English at Fordham, and the 2011 edition of Joyce Studies Annual, edited by Moshe Gold and Philip Sicker. Books will be available at the concert.