DR Alan Roughley was going to begin his lecture at the Baileys James Joyce Summer School yesterday by singing a version of the Ballad of Finnegan's Wake.

But his voice was impaired, he said, because he had recently spent an evening in Zurich with Joyce's grandson, Stephen, and had contracted a cold from him.

"His grandfather destroyed my mind and his grandson is now going to destroy my voice," he joked.

Dr Roughley, who was recently appointed research fellow at the University of York, was introduced by the school's director, Prof Terence Dolan, as "a great friend, source of intellectual energy and support for the school since it was founded".

He is the author of Joyce. A Critical Theory and co-editor of the first Joyce journal on the Internet, Hyper Media Joyce, launched last October. His book Reading Derrida, Reading Joyce is due to be published this autumn.

With his strained vocal chords eased by throat lozenges, Dr Roughley embarked on his "Fun For All At Finnegans Wake" lecture at Newman House in Dublin, which was prepared at short notice for the second day of the school after the illness of the scheduled speaker, Prof Barbara Hardy.

His lecture explored how Joyce was a "radical conservative philosopher" who used language and structure to subvert the dominant Western phallogocentric tradition. For those Joycean scholars who didn't understand what the word phallogocentric meant, Dr Roughley explained that it was composed of three elements phallus meaning pen is, logos meaning word and centric meaning central.

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce subverted this tradition by writing from the position of the female. The book's main female character, Anna Livia Plurabelle, represented Isis, the female god. She replaced the traditional male God as the "alpha and omega".

Through his constant use of puns in Finnegans Wake, Joyce also up ended the phallogocentric model. As a Hegelian novelist, he rejected the Aristotlean tradition of a book having a beginning a middle and an end. By eschewing this conventional teleological structure in Finnegans Wake, Joyce showed that language for him was an endless stream, said Dr Roughley.

"The structure of Finnegans Wake is I think still in our future and... I still don't think we fully understand the structure of that book," he said.

Dr Declan Kiberd, English lecturer at UCD's Department of Anglo Irish Literature and Drama, began his lecture with the quip that "The more I attend Joyce conferences and listen to people on Ulysses the more I wonder whether the speakers have read the same book as me."

Dr Kiberd, who wrote the introduction and annotations to the Penguin 20th Century Classics edition of Ulysses praised the "oddness" of Ulysses. In his lecture, "Mythical Mundanity Joyce and Irish Modernism," he outlined how Joyce's post colonial narrative existed "at an angle" to the tradition of European modernist writers. "He realised that he couldn't win freedom in the traditional forms, only freedom from them," he said.

This oddness was evidenced by, among other things, the fact that Ulysses was a celebration of mass culture, the familiar, the quotidian and the mundane. This contrasted, he said, with the tendency of most modern novelists, as a result of the first World War, to assert that only extremes of experience were valid.

While other modernist writers portrayed a war between Bohemians and the Bourgeoisie, Joyce portrayed a rapprochement between the two, as represented by the meeting between Stephen and Bloom in Ulysses.

Dr Kiberd described Joyce as "the most democratic of all the great modernists". Ulysses, he said, "was intended to celebrate the common man and woman but more importantly, to be read by them". It was for this reason that Joyce gave the first copies of Ulysses to hotel porters.

While in one way it could be a very difficult book, "anyone's reading of it was as good an another's and that's what Joyce intended," he said.

Joyce also tried to create "a new form of reading" by including in the text of Ulysses its own self criticism. The book contained "all the criticism needed to understand it," he said.

Concluding his lecture, Dr Kiberd said he was "not unaware that the logical corollary of this is that all the Joyce conferences should be disbanded, we should go home and I should sit down." And he did.