I headed back to Dublin in June 2007, where I spent six weeks directing an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on Ulysses. Actually, there’s another great story about Joyce tourism involved here: briefly, I was approached following a panel at that 2004 Joyce conference in Dublin about which I’ve already spoken, by [...]
If Bloomsday had not existed, we would have had to invent it—as indeed, of course, we have. Ulysses is, amongst other things, and extraordinary difficult novel; modernism is a difficult art. Indeed, as Leonard Diepeveen argues so persuasively in his book The Difficulties of Modernism, it’s probably the first artistic movement to make difficulty a [...]
Another familiar line of complaint attacks the commercialization of Joyce’s work. The Sunday breakfast was sponsored by a sausage manufacturer, who currently has its name all over the city, along with quotations of the one sentence in Ulysses in which their product is mentioned; the Wednesday breakfast was sponsored by Ireland’s largest exporter and most [...]
It was quite an organizing conceit: On June 13, 2004, 10,000 people assembled for a free breakfast en plein air on O’Connell (late Sackville) Street, Dublin, at tables and benches set up between the General Post Office, birthplace of the Irish Republic, on the west; the Millennium Spire, standing on the former site of Nelson’s [...]
After I had finished my undergraduate degree, I moved to Dublin for a year with my new wife, and did the postgraduate diploma in Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College. It just so happens, then, that I was living in Dublin in 1982, and witness to the many literary and more broadly public commemorations of Joyce’s [...]