This essay aims at exploring Joyce’s literary project as an excellent example which compromises the tension and opposition of national literature and world literature, drawing on Pascale Casanova’s provocative study of world literary space. Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters has the merit of analyzing insightfully the unequal structure of the global literary market. Her work proffers a critical weapon in the service of all deprived and dominated writers on the periphery. This paper purposes to deal with the issues of international literary competition and the asymmetrical mechanism in the world literary space. Casanova demonstrates a detailed analysis in this ground-breaking work on the meaning of world literary space as a hegemonic site for fierce rivalries and the desire of recognition among various national literature with different competitive powers. As Joyce’s case exemplifies, entry into world literary space based on the unequal hegemonic relationship between the center and the periphery occurs in the area of international canonicity. Joyce’s case is an illustrative case which offers a critical assessment of deconstructive projects to subvert the center with valorized peripheries, and eventually the re-shaping of world literary space. Joyce chooses a strategy of dual refusal. He rejects not only the submission to colonial power that exile in London as a literary center along with Paris would have represented, but equally any display of conformity to the national literary norms of Ireland. He was free to carry out an enterprise of unprecedented and novelty. Joyce opened up a literary connection to Paris, thus providing a solution for all those who rejected the colonial alternative of retreat to Dublin or treasonous emigration to London like Yeats. With Joyce (and later Beckett), Irish literature was constituted in terms of a triangle of capitals formed by London, Dublin, and especially Paris. This literary triangle was less geographic than aesthetic and that had been imagined and created in the space of European literature in Joyce’s time. Joyce’s dual opposition to Dublin and London was spatial as well as literary. He refuses to obey either the law of London or that of Dublin. He chose exile on the continent in order to produce an Irish literature in his own terms and established a new space for his imagined Irish literature in the republic of European literature.