NEWS: Stanford Scholar Wins Rights to Written Portraits of Author's Daughter as a Young Woman

CULTURE: Stanford Scholar Wins Rights to Written Portraits of Author's Daughter as a Young Woman

A small court case was decided this week. It's not some kind of landmark verdict or anything, but it's definitely noteworthy. It also seems to say some interesting things about where and to what extent one can go with other people's lives, especially when you entertwine them so tightly with your own.



See, Stanford English professor and Joycian scholar Carol Shloss had a theory. The crux of this theory was that Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's troubled daughter, was the muse for Finnegan's Wake. She spent fifteen years composing a book on the subject (2003's Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake), only to have the rug pulled out from under her when she was denied the right to quote various medical records and correspondences, Joyce's estate (namely Stephen James Joyce, the famous Joyce's grandson and agent of the estate, along with trustee Sean Sweeney) citing copyright infringement. She said that was fine, she guessed, but she did want to link said copyrighted on her web site; without these sources, after all, her premise stood on thin ice with shaky legs. Joyce the Younger said absolutely not. At that poin, Shloss had nough and brought the lawyers in, accusing the Joyce estate of destroying documents and unfairly hoarding information to protect the family name. That's when things got ugly.

It's hard to know who to side with in this case. On the one hand, you can pull the "information wants to be free" card and, to be fair, it must be a colossal drag to spend almost two decades of your life on a dissertation only to have it criticized and widely overlooked because your biggest supporting details are kept under lock and key. On the other hand, however, the feeling of ire involved with having every detail of your family's personal life dragged out as the career-making showboat of a scholar you hardly even know, just because your grandfather happened to become a viable area of scholarly expertise, must be pretty colossal as well.



Not much point in picking sides at this point, though: this week the story reached its thrilling conclusion, with Shloss ultimately winning the rights to use the quotes and documents she wanted. Within reason, anyway.

I tried to get on the website, but it appears to be Members Only and I haven't the foggiest idea how to enter from there, even though I've got the jacket. So at least whatever the Joyce estate wants to keep quiet is quiet enough, while still available to those who really desperately want it. Just maybe, then, it's fair enough for both.

Stephen Joyce is one of (if not the most) protective literary heirs in the world. He doesn't let anyone use anything.

If that were a scholarly paper, that should've all been fair use. So she went through all that to put out a book hardly anyone will buy? Seems kinda trivial even if to Joyce fans. I doubt she'll break even.

I don't think it was a monetary thing. She spent almost two decades pouring her heart and soul into this dissertation only to have it hacked to pieces and without any viable evidence to back up her claims. To someone like this woman that is like having a child and then the state starts coming after you for custody rights to your own child.....well, thats a bit exaggerated but to put all that hard work into something to have your hopes for completion dashed is, at the very least, disheartening.

Word. Having the evidence destroyed is pretty lame.

I don't think this thesis is at all insignificant - it's an interesting argument made about one of the most important literary works in the Twentieth Century. Its importance is not accurately represented by the number of people who read the book that argues on its behalf.

I think this attitude on behalf of the Joyce estate is simply lame, and it runs squarely counter to the spirit of literary culture.

But it's not just about the Important Literary Work. It's about a real person. It's digging up the dirt of someone's life. And you find it bad that that person's nephew is preventing that?

If someone wants the medical records of my family for a book, fuck 'em and fuck "the spirit of literary culture".

Shouldn't she have thought about that fifteen years ago?

I suppose it's the old "easier to ask forgiveness than permission" mentality.

"But it's not just about the Important Literary Work. It's about a real person. "

Yes, a real person who has been dead for 25 years.

Just so there is some kind of public record of my opinion in the event that I become interesting after I die; you can publish whatever the hell you want about me after I die. I'll be dead and therefore not in a position to give a shit. Put a picture of my dick on the cover of your book, I don't care. And my surviving relatives definitely don't have any claim to my life, anything I've produced in my life, or any information about me. That's a load of nonsense. But if anyone related to me produces something valuable and dies before I do, that shit belongs to me. Hands of bitches.

well- then you're determining that she's automatically doing it for money. some do write- to write. even in scholarly capacities.

She may be dead, but there are still living family members who have fist hand knowledge and memories of her. Now if you were writing a book on someone of whom there is no living memory, then I think you could make that argument.

This was my first thought as well. Why didn't she politely ask for the blessing of Joyce's heirs before investing so much of her own life into this?
Actually I'm also a bit surprised that she would have been given access to someone's medical records without the estate's permission to do her research in the first place.

In fact, academic monographs (i.e., research-based books by a single author) almost *never* make money. Certainly not first books, like this is. One publishes them because that's one's job as a scholar: to produce knowledge, and to make it available to others.

And the Joyce estate is absolutely awful about allowing scholarly access to Joyce's papers. I suppose there may be family feelings involved; on the other hand, it may also be greed--publishing the contents of Joyce's papers would be fairly lucrative, as academic things go, and if individual scholars publish bits and pieces the family may be worried that that diminishes the value of the archive. Regardless of their motives, though, Joyce was one of, if not *the* major English language novelist of the 20th century. It's really unconscionable to refuse serious researchers access to his papers. It's not as if Schloss writes for the National Enquirer.

As to "permission to do research": one doesn't need to ask permission to research. You might as well say she should have asked permission to think. One needs to ask permission sometimes to access certain privately-held archives. In this case, she obviously *did* have access to the material she needed--the Joyce estate just decided to be assholes when people questioned (as is standard academic procedure) the validity of her sources, precisely *because* her argument and research is new, and therefore groundbreaking. That kind of thing can kill a young scholar's career. Thank god the court found in her favor.