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Ulysses for All 2022


Online Course Spring Summer 2022

Read Ulysses by James Joyce in 2022! Join our global readership (and guest speakers) for an online odyssey from the James Joyce Centre this Spring where the 10th edition of ‘Ulysses for All’, led by Dubliner and Joycean, Dr. Caroline Elbay will celebrate the centenary of Joyce’s great Dublin epic.  A carnival of language (and linguistic styles) and a celebration of existence, Ulysses deals with (but is not limited to) sex, alcohol, adultery, identity (in all its forms), life, death, religion, and guilt.

The course is a live zoom session for 18 weeks on Wednesday evenings from 6pm – 8pm.
Start Date: 2/2/2022
End Date: 8/6/2022
Fee: €140

To critics who found the book unreadable and/or obscene, Joyce simply replied “If Ulysses isn’t fit to be read, then life isn’t fit to be lived”. Sign Up for Course!

This year’s course will celebrate the Book of Bloom: Joyce’s Wandering Womanly Jew “My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn…ye shall ere long enter into the golden city…the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future”  (U15: 1542-44)

When Jacques Mercanton posed the question to James Joyce regarding the placing of Bloom as the central figure in Ulysses, the response emphasised not only Bloom’s ‘Jewishness’ but also his ‘foreigness’: “Bloom Jewish?  Yes, because only a foreigner would do”.  The Jews were ‘foreigners’ in Dublin at that time.  There was no hostility towards them but contempt, yes, the contempt people always show for the unknown (Nadel).   This is one of many aspects that make Ulyssesperhaps even more relevant today than when it was originally written.  In an increasingly globalised world where migration, trans-nationalism, and the emergence of nation states (and nationalism) are an everyday reality, any investigation of the character, Bloom, is ultimately an investigation of both individual and social identity (along with all its attendant concerns and prejudices) in a world where ‘foreigness’ has become an intimate and everyday reality.

***Places are limited, so early booking is advised***