ABSTRACT
The parallelisms and intersections between James Joyce's local interests and those that permeate Spanish American literature encourage new approaches to the interface between the native and the foreign that elude the authority of totalizing versions of literary history. The prose of the 'Irish' and 'iconoclastic' he has remained a suggestive cultural referent for younger generations of Spanish American writers, a topic that merits a study of its own. But Joycean fiction in Spanish America challenges the belief that local attachments can dissolve in a whirl of puns and stylistic contortions. Joyce's book stands as a powerful response to Stephen Dedalus's anxieties about the English language in A Portrait, a language 'so familiar and so foreign' that he could not speak its words 'without unrest of spirit'. Joyce's work remains a provocative source of imaginative wisdom, a bewildering puzzle that teaches us to reconceive literature, history and the world beyond restrictive binaries such as original and copy, colonizer and colonized.
