James Joyce wrote four significant books: a volume of short stories, a highly worked fictional autobiography, a novel which for many is still to be regarded as the most remarkable ever written, and a brilliant, innovative, but scarcely describable exercise in word-invention and decomposition. In addition there is a play, which it would be fair to say has never exactly established itself in the theatre (‘Meet Flanagan. He's working on a dramatization of Exiles’, goes the old Dublin joke); a few dozen frail lyrics ingeniously but uncompellingly praised by Joyce's brother Stanislaus as ‘songs without thoughts’, which perhaps only the most hopelessly addicted Joycians can read with any serious attention; a fantasy memoir; a smattering of critical essays, mostly written in Joyce's penurious youth (not that Joyce ever became significantly less penurious, but his time became too precious for such things later in his life); an abundance of letters, a number of satirical squibs, and a series of brilliant limericks. In terms of published output, James Joyce is far from prodigious.

But if in this, narrowly quantitative, sense Joyce is not much of an author, there is another, more important, sense in which he may be vastly more than one. For may it not be that Joyce is the author not just of the handful of texts credited to him, but also of all the work produced in his name? Michel Foucault coined the term ‘founder of discursivity’ to describe this kind of authorship. Such authors

‘James Joyce’ indeed now names a peripatetic global institution, a whole hermeneutic culture, a vast and ever-expanding enterprise of exposition and interpretation. The ‘work of Joyce’ is more than just a particular collection of texts; it is a generative code, a discursive epidemic, a chain letter.