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/