Groden, Michael 1947-

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Groden, Michael 1947-
(Michael Lewis Groden)

PERSONAL:

Born May 30, 1947, in Buffalo, NY; son of Sheldon and Maxine Groden; married Molly Peacock, August 19, 1992. Ethnicity: "Caucasian/Jewish." Education: Dartmouth College, B.A., 1969; Princeton University, M.A., 1972, Ph.D., 1975.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Office—Department of English, University College 713, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 3K7, Canada; fax: 519-661-3403. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, visiting assistant professor, 1975-77, assistant professor, 1977-78, associate professor, 1978-83, professor of English, 1983—.

MEMBER

International James Joyce Foundation, International Association for the Study of Irish Literature, European Society for Textual Scholarship, Modern Language Association of America, Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, Society for Textual Scholarship, Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, Electronic Literature Organization, Modernist Studies Association, Society for Digital Humanities, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, James Joyce Society of New York.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Guggenheim fellow, 1979-80; research grants, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 1991-94, 1995-98, and 2004-07; D.Litt., National University of Ireland, 2004.

WRITINGS:

"Ulysses" in Progress, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1977.

(Editor) The James Joyce Archive, Volumes 5-6, 12-27, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1977–1979.

(Editor) James Joyce's Manuscripts: An Index, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1980.

(Coeditor) The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1994, 2nd edition, 2005.

(Coeditor) Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-texts, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.

General editor of the series, "The James Joyce Archive," sixty-three volumes, Garland Publishing (New York, NY). Contributor to books. Contributor to literature journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Michael Groden once told CA: "I am a professor of English and literary scholar whose work mostly falls into a field now known as ‘genetic criticism.’ This approach to works of literature studies how they are made, their genesis. It looks carefully at all the surviving materials for a work—the author's notes, drafts, manuscripts, letters, and any typescripts, computer printouts, publisher's proofs—not to produce an accurate text of the work, as traditionally would be done with these materials, but to learn more about the work or about the author's creative process.

"I wrote my book "Ulysses" in Progress in order to discover whether knowing anything about Joyce's writing of Ulysses would help us to understand his book any better. The consensus has been that my book demonstrated that knowing such information does aid in an understanding of Joyce's work, especially in its argument that the documents show Joyce's conception of Ulysses changing as he worked on the book and that these differing concepts are part of the meaning of the finished Ulysses."

Using Joyce's manuscripts was frustrating because they ended up in several different libraries throughout the world, and so when Garland Publishing was interested in producing a photo reproduction edition of all the manuscripts, I was glad to supervise the project. The result was the 63-volume ‘James Joyce Archive,’ the first facsimile edition of almost the entire archive related to the works of a major writer.

"Later, I extended my theoretical interests in the ways that books get written into more general issues of literary theory, and this resulted in the reference work that I coedited, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. I also coedited Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, a collection of translated French essays that combine manuscript studies and theoretical approaches.