Resumen de 'Ireland at the Bar': James Joyce, Myles Joyce and the Maamtrasna Trials Revisited
Joyce's 1907 "Ireland at the Bar" essay, with its allusion to the historical figure Myles Joyce, is frequently but also fleetingly referenced in Joycean studies. Both the textual history of "L'Irlanda alla sbarra" and the nature of Joyce's thematic appropriation of the "figure" of Myles Joyce, however, are much less stable than such passing references would suggest. This essay builds on my recent monograph The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland to examine more closely Joyce's textual deployment of the Maamtrasna trials in his 1907 essay and later in Finnegans Wake. It revisits these texts from the perspective of language and translations: who speaks, and in what language; who comprehends and through what means. It also engages with the broader and current critical question of Joyce's treatment of Irish, whether as the shadow of a lost language or as part of a dynamic of language shift and linguistic change.
