Scholarcast 13: Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living
Declan Kiberd (UCD School Of English, Drama & Film)
- Subscribe to UCDscholarcast in iTunes
- Subscribe to UCDscholarcast
- Download this episode (40mb 192kbps mp3)
- Download transcript (103kb PDF)
Abstract
In this episode Declan Kiberd reads the closing chapter of his latest book Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living published by Faber and Faber. Kiberd shows that Ulysses, far from being the epitome of elitism, was always intended as a book for the common people. It was rooted in their experience and offers a humane vision of a decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the book’s hero, shows the young Stephen Dedalus how he can grow and mature as an artist and as a tolerant, adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the streets of Dublin. Apparently banal, he embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, and in this way offers us a model for living well.
Declan Kiberd
Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. Among his books are Synge and the Irish Language (Macmillan, 1979), Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (Macmillan,1985), Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Jonathan Cape,1995) Irish Classics (Grants, 2000) and The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He introduced and edited The Annotated Students’ Ulysses (1992) in the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics series.
