Editor's Acknowledgments

The word polytropos in the title of this collection of essays, as Fritz Senn notes, appears in the first line of the Odyssey. Homer uses this epithet to describe his hero as sagacious, cunning, clever, versatile or a man “of many turns”. This term, in addition to “parallax”, was one of the first terms that Fritz introduced me to when I attended his seminar at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation years ago. Polytropos turns out to be one of the many seemingly innocuous terms that Fritz has taken up in his work in order to show, as he puts it, what is in plain sight. However, the word is also apt for describing Fritz’s approach, as it, too, turns around particular words, phrases, and themes in cunning, clever ways, themselves full of twists and turns that bring us back to Joyce’s texts to shed light on what would not have been noticed otherwise.

I am endlessly indebted to Fritz Senn for the opportunity to work with him on this project. He has stoically endured revisiting these essays, suffering with equanimity my suggestions for minor changes. As always, it has been awe-inspiring to work closely with Fritz, one of the people who has made my life in Switzerland richer.

I also owe a great deal of thanks to the support of many other people, including my colleagues at the English Department at the University of Zurich, Shane Walshe and Anne-Claire Michoux, as well as my colleagues at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, Ruth Frehner, Silke Stebler, and Ursula Zeller. I have also benefited from the wise advice and kind support of many, including Sabrina Alonso, Bill Brockman, Tim Conley, Ron Ewart, Rahel Huwyler, Erika Mihálycsa, Christine O’Neill, Penelope Paparunas, and Jolanta Wawrzycka among others.

While many of the essays in this collection have appeared elsewhere, three make their print debut here: “Parallax on Show” is Fritz’s response to Parallaxing Joyce (2017), Penelope Paparunas’ and my tribute to him. His response in this volume fittingly adds yet another layer of parallax to that project. “Joyce’s Malleable Time” was hammered into shape during the August Workshop in Zurich in 2015. “Joyce’s Sense of Rumour” first began to circulate at summer schools in 2019.

The remaining essays in this collection have appeared in various scholarly journals and edited volumes in the last ten years or so, and I wish to extend my appreciation to those who kindly granted their permission to reprint them: “Joyce, Craftsman, Artificer” originally appeared with New Dublin Press in 2014, and it is reprinted here by permission of Jonathan Creasy. Three of the essays originally appeared in Joyce Studies in Italy: “Joyce’s Different Conjugials” (2015), “Mercurial Interpolations in Ulysses” (2017), and “Ulyssean Histrionics in Everyday Life” (2013); they are reprinted here with permission of Franca Ruggeri. “Coincidental Joyce” (2012) and “Ulysses: Latent Coherence of Deviating Episodes” (2011), both of which appeared in the Dublin James Joyce Journal, are reprinted with Anne Fogarty’s kind permission. “Transmutation in Digress”, which was originally published in the James Joyce Quarterly (2010), appears here with permission of Sean Latham and Carol Kealiher. “Events in Language: Joycean Extras” (2019), “The Joyce of Side Effects” (2018), and “The Odyssey through Joycean Lenses” (2014), all of which appeared in Hyperion, are reprinted here thanks to Erika Mihálycsa. “James Joyce’s Ulysses: Hell, Purgatory, Heaven in ‘Wandering Rocks’” (2013) originally appeared in the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) and is reprinted by permission of HJEAS and its editor, Donald E. Morse. Noelle Moran at University College Dublin Press has granted permission for “In the Arms of the Classics: Meta-Morpheus in ‘Eumaeus’”, which first appeared in Anne Fogarty and Fran O’Rourke’s Voices on Joyce (2015), to reappear here. “The Warped Modality of Joyce’s ‘Ithaca’”, which originally appeared in 2015 in James Joyce: Whence, Whither and How: Studies in Honour of Carla Vaglio, is reprinted with permission of Terese Prudente. “Active Silences” originally appeared in James Joyce’s Silences (2018) and is reprinted here with permission of Jolanta Wawrzycka. Finally, David Vichnar has granted permission to reprint “Logodaedalian Bypaths: Evading the Obvious”, which appeared in Hypermedia Joyce Studies (2016).

There have been some minor changes to some of the essays included in this volume, but these remain futile attempts to avoid the inevitable overlap of topics, one of the side effects of revisiting favorite passages from a different vantage point.

My sincere thanks also go to Geert Lernout, who has been tremendously enthusiastic and supportive regarding this project, as well as Masja Horn and her team at Brill, who remained patient throughout the publication process. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous reader of the manuscript, who has, I believe, made this a better collection.

Finally, thanks to my wonderful son, Max Zappe, to whom this book is dedicated with much love.

Frances Ilmberger