Lecture

8 August 2025 at 6.30pm

We welcomed Prof. Martin Connolly (Tsurumi University) on Friday, 8 August 2025 at 6.30pm for a lecture on the lasting legacy of James Joyce’s collection of poems, Chamber Music (1907).

Chamber Music was James Joyce’s first published book, and a book of poetry at that, not the prose he is so famous for. Chamber Music may still delight his readers, as the language of the poetry conjures a rarefied world and sensibility, but it doesn’t receive a lot of attention in critical circles. This is unfortunate because the book is clearly a portal onto the early Joyce, one which, with a little careful reading, can cast light onto Joyce’s early obsessions and attitudes towards women, towards himself, and towards his art.

If Chamber Music is a book of love poetry, it is a book of love poetry by a person who lacked understanding of women, at least at that time. The lover at the end of Chamber Music who pleads ‘My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?’ has clear resonance with Stephen Dedalus’s ungentlemanly debacle with Emma Clery in Stephen Hero. 

Joyce made up for his failings in Dubliners to a great degree, of course, with a variety of convincingly drawn female characters, but in Chamber Music, as in some other early works, he failed to capture women’s individuality, psychology and identity, perhaps because his focus, and his passion, were elsewhere. 

Prof. Connolly offered a careful analysis of this and more, their lasting influence in Joyce’s later works, and their enduring legacy today.

Born in Liverpool and raised in Belfast, Prof. Martin Connolly has resided in Japan since 1991. He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin (BA) and Queen’s University (MA). He is a Professor of English Literature at Tsurumi University in Yokohama, Japan and teaches creative writing at Keio University. He has published on Medieval English Literature, James Joyce, and other Irish writers. His peer-reviewed published research on Joyce covers Ulysses, Dubliners and Chamber Music and the influence of Theosophist poet Paul Gregan. He is also an active writer of poetry, short stories and novels, including Belfast, with Dinosaurs, 1979 (Shanway Press, 2022), Narrative Poems – Out of the Ordinary (Brimstone Press, 2024), and a book of original jazz photos Kind of Green (Snowchild Press, 2023). You may find out more about his work at https://snowchildpress.weebly.com.

The James Joyce Centre is supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.