In many minds, the name ‘James Joyce’ stands for a kind of writing that is arcane, obscure, and of interest only to students of English literature – indeed, for some it may stand for literature itself, understood as an impenetrable and elitist manipulation of words that is best left well alone. Most academic studies of Joyce, were they to fall into the hands of those who hold such views, would do nothing to diminish these connotations. Even scholarly investigations of ‘Joyce and popular culture’, important though they have been within the critical tradition, tend to reinforce this attitude to Joyce, since what they often document is the process whereby the dross of second-rate material is transmuted into the gold of high art by a supremely sophisticated author catering only for a minority audience.

I am not about to argue that this perception of Joyce is, in some simple sense, wrong; my purpose is just to point out how the development of new ways of talking about the issues involved in the notions of ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ culture complicate the picture. The current theoretical debate about popular culture has been going on for a long time, beginning perhaps with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, with its famous and much-discussed chapter on ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. More recently, however, the conversation has become increasingly intense and many-sided, with important contributions by, among others, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, Tania Modleski, and Slavoj Žižek.