Course
5 February — 5 June 2025
We are delighted to announce our annual Ulysses for All course. Join our global readership and guest speakers at the James Joyce Centre where Dr. Caroline Elbay will lead Ulysses for All 2025: ‘From the Cave of the Cyclops: Imagining Self, Imagining Nation’.
Course Details:
-Hybrid Zoom/In-Person at the James Joyce Centre
-Start Date: February 5th 2025
-End Date: June 4th 2025
-Time: Every Wednesday at 6-8pm GMT
-Fee: €200
Spaces are limited so it is advisable to register in advance.
The course description is below:
“What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen. Ireland, says Bloom. I as born here. Ireland… But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.” (U12: 1430-83)
As we commence 2025 faced with seemingly increasing crises of humanity ranging from war and conflict in Europe and the Middle East, internal political unrest within the EU and the US, ongoing refugee crises, ubiquitous fake news, etc., the sentiments of Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ provide a chilling sense of prescience: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre… the centre cannot hold…Things fall apart…The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity’.
In an attempt to consider and interpret the current world situation, Ulysses for All (2025) will focus on the idea of IMAGINING SELF: IMAGINING NATION.
Ulysses is, without doubt, a pedagogic text – one that invites us to look into our own humanity and where Leopold Bloom, the central character, undoubtedly constitutes Joyce’s attempt to embody the most humane attributes of a modern identity in a world engulfed by chaos due to nationalist, religious, and imperialist/colonial aggression – ideologies which Joyce would later dub ‘the wisdom of the old world’.
While Joyce was among the hopeful integrationists of the era, his attitude is somewhat coloured by an underlying suspicion that fear and hatred is more enduring in humans than acceptance – hence the situations we face, again and again, over a century later.
The future has, arguably, never been more unpredictable than at this moment; humanity finds itself depending on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of human interest or even common sense. Mankind appears divided between those who believe in human omnipotence (Supermen), and those for whom powerlessness has become the principal experience of their lives. It is not sufficient that we merely lament and theorise the problems of our era, but imperative that we, as human beings, strive to shape the necessary and humane response.
We look forward to seeing you in Ulysses for All 2025!
Registration: €200
The James Joyce Centre is supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.