Bonus Bloomcast: Declan Kiberd, author of Ulysses and Us

In this special episode Alice, Lex and Adam geek out with the man
who—Joyce aside—has probably been cited more than any other in
our podcast: Professor Declan Kiberd. Professor Kiberd is the
author of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, as well as
the introduction to the Penguin Classics official partner
edition.


Buy Ulysses and Us:
https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571242559/ulysses-and-us-the-art-of-everyday-living





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In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's
Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life
under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide
to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary
criticism, Ulysses and Us offers revolutionary insights to the
scholar and the first-time reader alike.


Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James
Joyce's Ulysses, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on
Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an
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 city streets, and in
his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He
embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and
in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition
of the literature upon which Joyce drew in writing Ulysses, such
as Homer, Dante and the Bible.


Declan Kiberd is the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature
of the Modern Nation, which won the Irish Times Prize in 1995. It
is one of the most influential works on Irish culture published
in the last twenty years. His Irish Classics came out in 2000 and
won the prestigious Lannan Prize in the USA. He is the Professor
of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin and is a
widely respected broadcaster, critic and reviewer.


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A student of environmental policy at Sciences Po-Paris, Alice
McCrum runs programming at the American Library in Paris. 


 


In between fits of Joycean nerdery, Dr. Lex Paulson is Executive
Director of the School of Collective Intelligence at Université
Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco. An adopted Parisian, he
teaches at Sciences Po-Paris and writes on the past and future of
democracy.


 


Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company,
Paris. He is the author of the novel Feeding Time, available in
French as Défense de nourrir les vieux.


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