U22 The Centenary Ulysses Podcast

In this hallucinatory episode, in which everything that has happened up to this point in Ulysses is reimagined, Bloom and Stephen wander in “Nighttown,” Joyce’s version of the red-light district of Dublin. We talk about confusion, hilarity, gender roles, obscenity, and redemption. Joining us are Kelly Bryan from the Blooms & Barnacles podcast, John McCourt, professor at University of Macerata, Italy, and Ronan Crowley, postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Set in a maternity hospital, “Oxen” parodies the development of English prose. A celebration of maternity or a rival creative feat? Joyce called it the most difficult episode “to interpret and to execute”; we talk about the shortcuts he took in composing it and its unexpected humor. Joining us are Greg Harradine, composer in the Scottish Borders, Emmet O’Cuana, Dublin writer living in Australia, and Chrissy Van Mierlo, Museum director at Loughborough Bellfoundry, UK, and recovering Joycean.  

A woman, a man, a beach at twilight, and at least one orgasm: but what exactly happens? Is Gerty MacDowell brainwashed or liberated by the women’s magazines she reads? Is the episode misogynist or empathetic? We complicate these binaries with Anne Fogarty, professor at University College, Dublin, Cathal Mac Thréinfhir, retired teacher in Limerick, Nuala O’Connor, Irish novelist, James Turner, professor at UC Berkeley, and Vicki Mahaffey, professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In Barney Kiernan’s pub, what does belonging look like? What do language and cliché have to do with self-determination, nationalism, and inclusion? Our wide-ranging interlocutors are Jim Ward, tour guide of Nora Barnacle’s Galway home, Valérie Bénéjam, maître de conférences at the University of Nantes, France, Daniel Mulhall, Irish Ambassador to the United States, András Kappanyos, professor at Miskolc University, Hungary, and Vincent Cheng, born in Taiwan and professor at the University of Utah.

Surrounded by singing men in the Ormond, Bloom experiences the consolations and dangers of music as he watches Blazes Boylan knock back a drink before his tryst with Molly. We talk about how Joyce transforms words into a seductive soundscape with Katherine O’Callaghan, lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Peter Kennedy, professor at the University of Hong Kong, as well as Dakota Brown and Emma Farry from the Berkeley Ulysses seminar. And we listen to some songs…

This episode presents readers with nineteen seemingly random vignettes around Dublin featuring a mass of characters connected only slightly by a promenading Jesuit priest and a Viceroy on parade. We talk about urban atomization, truth and the imagination, and sadistic humor with Matthew O’Leary, a philosophy graduate from Cork, Ireland, Scarlett Baron, associate professor in the English Department at University College, London, and Sergio Salvia Coelho, a theater critic from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Why does Joyce associate Stephen’s conversation in the National Library of Ireland with such a dangerous Homeric episode? Scylla and Charybdis are monsters, one ready to create a lethal whirlpool, the other to snatch men out of the ship. Thinking through this surprisingly dramatic episode with us are Alex Benoit, English teacher at the Greenfield school in North Carolina, and Matthew Creasy, professor of literature at the University of Glasgow, as well as former Berkeley student, Mallory Gong.

As we track Bloom's wanderings in this lunchtime episode, we consider the relationship between food and power. We talk about food imagery, colonialism, animals, and class, and how the violent binary of “Eat or be eaten” breaks down in Bloom’s memory of his picnic with Molly on Howth Head. In conversation with us are Matthew Hayward, professor at the University of South Pacific, Fiji, Sebastián Maldonado-Cano, literature major from Texcoco, Mexico, and Mark Bloomberg, film maker from Brooklyn.

This episode centers on the Evening Telegraph offices where men gather to talk about journalism, tell jokes, mock political speeches, and celebrate great oratory. We talk about rhetoric and windbaggery with Liam Heneghan, writer and professor of environmental science and studies at DePaul, Terence Killeen, former Irish Times editor and scholar at the James Joyce Centre, Dublin, and Lucas Petersen, journalist and professor at Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In Glasnevin cemetery for the funeral of Paddy Dignam, Bloom thinks “in the midst of death, we are in life.” We think about different kinds of death and life in “Hades” with a variety of guests: doctors Kim Kwang Taik from Seoul, South Korea, and Alejandro Dagnino Veras from Lima, Peru, Barry Devine, professor at Heidelberg University, Amanda Greenwood, literary scholar and archivist, and from the 2020 UC Berkeley seminar, Dakota Brown, Dylan Duong, Jolene Gazman, and our own Max Ambrose.