This essays aims at exploring Joyce’s attitudes toward the question of Irishness, focusing on such problematic issues as Irish race, nationhood, nationalism, Irish culture, and the relationship of Gaelic and English. As Edward Said convincingly suggests, any rigid identity including Irishness is no more than the target of deconstruction in the Derridean sense. It is thus required to expound the notion of Irish nationhood and Irish national culture as the living and dominant collective force intervening and impacting on the Irish history. What matters is a concrete historical understanding of these given notions under discussion. Joyce’s literary approaches are also to be examined in terms of his thoughts on the relationship of Irish nationhood and Irish culture. There are two literary camps in the evaluation of Joyce’s literary world: Joyce as provincial, national, and post-colonial writer, or Joyce as cosmopolitan and post-national writer. Joyce’s thought adventure, however, surpasses and deconstructs this kind of binary opposition which fails to capture the essence of Joyce’s works. Joyce’s life-long desire to fashion a language that would transcend all languages, beyond the reach of tradition and subduing all linguistic and historic nationalisms and ideologies, cannot simply be regarded as a purely aesthetic gesture proffered from the top of a lofty ivory tower by an elitist modernist self exiled in upon his ego. The cross between a highly particularized literary idiolect and polyglottal strands could only modulate into a politicized pluridialectal glossary with a universalist, translinguistic, transnational as well as transcultural slant.