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„Great writers,“ those who constitute our canon (at any given moment, one should add warily, since aesthetic canons fluctuate considerably over time), have invariably been the focus of reception studies, partly because they provide the most fertile ground for research, but partly also because literary scholars (and in particular the aspiring doctoral candidate: I myself graduated with an influence /reception study of this kind) need some justification for their endeavors, and what better ticket into the ivory rower - or onto the book market - than the study of the most seminal and widely accepted authors? James Joyce is just such a „great author.“ And „James Joyce and German Literature,“ the subject of this essay, must inevitably result in some form of reception study. But just what form should it take? Within the limited space of one article, it would be impossible to survey in toto Joyce's influence on German literature; that is, the multiple receptions of Joyce by some four or five generations of authors writing in German.
Böll on Joyce, Joyce on Böll : a gnomonical reading of Heinrich Böll's "Die schönsten Füße der Welt"
(1998)
It is my contention - but not my whole argument, as we shall soon see - that this shift or new departure can be attributed in part to Böll's introduction to the work of James Joyce, an event that took place at or around the time when Böll began travelling to Ireland in 1954. Indeed, as if in corroboration of this assumption, the earliest mentionings of Joyce that I have found occur in the second and third episodes of Böll's popular travelogue „Irisches Tagebuch“, published in 1957. It is worth noting, however, that neither of these two comments is formulated in a way that would presuppose more than a superficial knowledge of Joyce's works. And later, too, we find only the occasional allusion to or mention of the lrish writer in Böll's literary work. Nor does Joyce or his œuvre figure prominently in Böll's countless essays and interviews on writers and writing. Even in the short article „Über den Roman“ of 1960, which is devoted to the modern novel and would provide the natural occasion for an acknowledgement of this kind, Böll refers neither to „A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man“ nor to „Ulysses“, not to mention „Finnegans Wake“.