Philip Sicker – Fordham Now https://now.fordham.edu The official news site for Fordham University. Thu, 15 Dec 2016 20:03:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://now.fordham.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/favicon.png Philip Sicker – Fordham Now https://now.fordham.edu 32 32 232360065 English Professors Edit Annual Journal on James Joyce https://now.fordham.edu/inside-fordham/fordham-university-press-publishes-annual-journal-on-james-joyce/ Thu, 15 Dec 2016 20:03:25 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=59585 Sir Tom Stoppard, British playwright and screenwriter, described James Joyce as “an essentially private man, who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.” However much Joyce succeeded in this, it’s obvious he had and still maintains public notice.

Fordham professors of English Philip Sicker, Ph.D.,, and Moshe Gold, Ph.D. co-edit a Joyce Studies Annuala 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.

To outsiders, James Joyce’s 100-year appeal can be mystifying. However, Sicker calls his masterwork Ulysses “probably the most seminal and influential novel of the twentieth century.” Joyce himself once claimed the book would keep English scholars busy well into the next century, and it hasThe controversial novel was involved in a 1933 court case which, in a now-celebrated triumph against censorship, ended in its American release with Random House publishers. It is set on a single day in Dublin. Sicker believes however, that it “contains the world.”

Joyce Studies Annual invites submissions concerned with any aspect of Joyce’s work. It has a special interest in essays on historical, archival or comparative issues. The 2015 issue is available here. The 2016 issue is available this month and marks Joyce Studies Annual’s 10th anniversary at Fordham.

– Kiran Singh

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Professors’ Book Assays the Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski https://now.fordham.edu/inside-fordham/faculty-reads/professors-release-book-on-the-films-of-krzysztof-kieslowski/ Fri, 28 Oct 2016 17:00:00 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=57720 Elephants and ToothachesA little more than a decade ago, English professor Philip Sicker, Ph.D., organized a faculty seminar on Polish film director and art house darling, Krzysztof Kieślowski.

No one attending expected the intellectual exercise to become a book, but now it has.

Of Elephants and Toothaches: Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ‘Decalogue’ (Fordham University Press, 2016), a collection of essays on the director’s work, was co-edited by two of that seminar’s attendees: Eva Badowska, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Francesca Parmeggiani, Ph.D., an associate professor of Italian and comparative literature.

The book release coincided with the re-release by the Criterion Collection of Kieślowski’s Decalogue, a 10-part series of short films initially created for television. Each of the 10 segments is loosely based on one of the Ten Commandments, said Badowska, who remembers seeing the initial release of the series on television in her native Poland in 1988.

“I never expected this would become a scholarly project,” she said. “I have a very visceral relationship to these films.”

Badowska said that while Kieślowski intended the series to transcend its particular time and place, it could not divorce itself from its historical setting completely. The language and visuals place it distinctively in Poland in the late 1980s. This tension between universal themes and visual and linguistic specificity gave rise to the unique title of the book.

Kieślowski once said that his films were as universal as a toothache: It doesn’t matter where you’re from; the pain is the same. He argued that the themes of the Decalogue are ones that anyone could relate to: jealousy, love, hate, and joy.

But Kieślowski also once spoke of a somewhat dubious childhood memory: seeing an elephant loose on the streets of Kraków. The image is as distinct to a time and place as it is odd, said Badowska, and “instantiates the haptic cinematography and belief in the concretizing power of the image in Kieślowski’s films.” She cited a scene in which a dying man lay in his hospital bed, focusing on a leak in the ceiling. The leak and its accompanying “drip, drip, drip” place the viewer in a structure that is representative of the crumbling infrastructure of Communist Poland in the late 1980s.

“His intention was to talk about universal and ethical dilemmas, but the film technique makes the dilemmas palpable, almost hyperreal, with a hypermaterialistic approach,” she said. “It’s not just any water dripping,” Badowska, a scholar of language and literature, co-wrote with Parmeggiani in the introduction to the book.

The professors have each written a chapter on a particular episode. Parmeggiani’s chapter is titled “Decalogue Seven: A Tale of Love, Failing Words, and Moving Images.” Badowska’s chapter focuses on Decalogue Six, which loosely examines the commandment “You shall not commit adultery.”

In Decalogue Six, a young man spies on and eventually falls in love with an older female lover. Badowska notes that the woman addresses her young lover in the familiar second-person singular, “you,” while he addresses her in the third-person singular “Pani,” or madam. When he says, “I love you,” the film’s subtitle reads as “I love Madam.”

Badowska said that such a subtitle misses the nuance of the exchange, as do many of the subtitles.

For Badowska, it is the specificity and nuance found in the Polish dialogue, which is missing in the English subtitles, that supports the stronger argument—that his work is of a particular time and place, rather than of universal intent. It’s a language that Badowska understands as intimately as she does English. For all of the Decalogue’s universality, the film remains intimately tied to Poland in the late 1980s.

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In Ulysses, a Window Into the Author’s Personal Struggle https://now.fordham.edu/inside-fordham/in-ulysses-a-window-into-the-authors-personal-struggle/ Wed, 06 Jul 2016 15:00:50 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=51439 English professor Philip Sicker has just finished a book about visual themes in the novel Ulysses, by James Joyce, whose own eyes were failing as he wrote it.When James Joyce was writing his classic novel Ulysses, he clearly had eyesight and vision on his mind, says English professor Philip Sicker, PhD. For one thing, the theme of sight is creatively presented throughout the novel, undergirding many of its most poignant (or controversial) moments, Sicker said.

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.

Sicker2And 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 18th-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.”

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Faculty Reads: English Professors Lead Massive Joyce Project https://now.fordham.edu/arts-and-culture/faculty-reads-english-professors-lead-massive-joyce-project/ Mon, 08 Dec 2014 15:51:19 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=2314 For more than a decade, scholarship on the work of literary giant James Joyce found a home in the Joyce Studies Annual, a premier journal created in 1989 by Thomas Stanley at the University of Texas.

jjsaWhen 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.

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