Ulysses, Pandemic, and Social Distancing

Recorded June 16, 2020. The word pandemic – from the Greek πάνδημος
– means that which belongs to all people and so works as a kind of
plural to the word everyman. Indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic is
universal in that it touches everyone, yet it is also singular,
each country, indeed, each person experiences it differently.
Likewise, Ulysses is the great novel of the universal made
individual, as embodied by the book’s protagonist, the ‘everyman’
Leopold Bloom. In this webinar, four leading Joycean scholars will
discuss what Joyce’s Ulysses can say about the current crisis.
Speakers : Valérie Bénéjam is Maîtresse de Conférences in English
Literature and a member of the L’AMo (L’Antique et le Moderne)
research group at the University of Nantes (France). She has
written many articles about Joyce. Catherine Flynn is Associate
Professor of English at UC Berkeley where she works on Irish
modernist literature and culture in a European avant-garde context
and on critical theory. John McCourt is Professor of English at the
University of Macerata. He is a specialist in Joyce Studies and in
nineteenth and twentieth century Irish literature. Sam Slote is
Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of
Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (Palgrave, 2013) and is the co-editor,
with Luca Crispi, of How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Wisconsin,
2007). Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/