"James Joyce and the Epistolary Arts: the Jahnke Collection at the Zürich Joyce Foundation" Nicholas Morris, SUNY-Buffalo Outside His Jurisfiction: Interrogating James Joyce's Non-Fiction University of York 23-25 March 2012

1. Nicholas Morris
SUNY-Buffalo
nmorris@buffalo.edu
“Outside His Jurisfiction”: Interrogating Joyce’s Non-Fiction
25 March 2012
James Joyce and the Epistolary Arts: the Jahnke Bequest at
the Zürich Joyce Foundation
QUOTATIONS
1. Novels I suppose are pure literature and diaries are pure life. Autobiographies are life,
but life that has been adroitly rearranged for the show window. The great books of
confession, the Rousseau and the Augustine, are all too few. So that we come back to
the great letter writers for the happiest mixture of both.
– Thorton Wilder, “On Reading the Great Letter Writers”
2. The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but
the person you are writing to, but which you do not want to be destroyed, but
perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We
want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to
feel that no one but those close friends will ever read what we have written.
– T.S. Eliot, “English Poets as Letter Writers” (MS
Houghton), cited in Letters of Eliot Vol. I 1898–1922
3. But the curatorial dilemma…illustrates a Foucauldian point that has become
fundamental everywhere else in literary-historical criticism: that taxonomies, archives,
and other systems of codifying knowledge do not just name things that are visible in
advance (from sexualities to illnesses to books); they also, to a certain extent,
determine what is visible in the first place.
– Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Invisible Ink”

2. Morris 2
4. L’archive, ce n’est pas ce qui sauvegarde, malgré sa fuite immédiate, l’événement de
l’énoncé et conserve, pour les mémoires futures, son état civil d’évadé; c’est ce qui, à
la racine même de l’énoncé-événement, et dans le corps où il se donne, définit
d’entrée de jeu le système de son énonçabilité. L’archive n’est pas non plus ce qui recueille
la poussière des énoncés redevenus inertes et permet le miracle éventuel de leur
résurrection; c’est ce qui définit le mode d’actualité de l’énoncé-chose; c’est le système
de son fonctionnement.
[The archive is not that which, despite its immediate escape, safeguards the event of
the statement, and preserves, for future memories, its status as an escapee; it is that
which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines
at the outset the system of its enunciability. Nor is the archive that which collects the dust
of statements that have become inert once more, and which may make possible the
miracle of their resurrection; it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the
statement-thing; it is the system of its functioning.]
– Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir
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Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Print.

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