To study the Bloomsday festival patrons in Melbourne is to reveal both the chasm which exists between the educational élites and real 'on-the-ground' readers, and to demonstrate some ways in which that is being bridged. Academe, and following them, some influential members of the press, routinely bemoan, often using discourses created by modernism, how their prime canonical construct, Joyce, has been put beyond the reach of 'common' readers. However, by studying the reading and attendance

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... ours of the patrons of a small Joyce-focussed festival, a different and quite startling case can be made about new formations in book-consumption and how 'consumers' engage with the literary establishment. One could argue that, despite its prepostmodern élitism, literary academia has created a taste for Joyce, but in Melbourne the picture is more multi-stranded than that, less exclusively literary and more polyvocal. Reading and enjoying Joyce is not necessarily an encounter between academics and the unwashed. Why? Because Joyce is arguably the most canonical writer of the twentieth century, appearing regularly on '100 best book' lists, it is easy to forget how recent a development Joyce's canonisation is. In Australia, teaching of Ulysses began in the 1940s in Mechanics Institutes, but it was institutionalised much later in universities (often in the late 1960s, Frances Devlin-Glass TEXT Special Issue No 4 www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue4/devlinglass.htm 2/20 Frances Devlin-Glass TEXT Special Issue No 4 www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue4/devlinglass.htm 3/20