Year of Ulysses talks 2013

Continuing the year-long series of talks  organised by Modernist Versions around James Joyce’s classic book, Ulysses, Trinity Long Room Hub and the School of English are delighted to announce two talks for the New Year.

Prof. Anne Fogarty, UCD, and Prof. Sam Slote, TCD will deliver their unique perspectives on chapters from the novel.


Event Details:

Thursday 17th January 2013, 3-4pm
Prof. Anne Fogarty, UCD
‘In the Holy Land of Michan’: Combating Revivalism in “Cyclops”
Neill/Hoey Lecture Theatre – Trinity Long Room Hub

Wednesday 6th February 2013, 12.30 – 1.30pm
Prof. Sam Slote
‘Between Commentary and Eternity’: Annotating Dante and Joyce
Neill/Hoey Lecture Theatre – Trinity Long Room Hub

All welcome, and admission is free.  For further details, email digital.humanities@tcd.ie

About the talks

Thursday 17th January 2013, 3-4pm
“In the holy land of Michan”: Combating Revivalism in “Cyclops” 
Prof. Anne Fogarty, UCD 

Enhancing national self-respect and the retooling of heroes from Celtic myth to provide inspiring models of courage and combative action were amongst the chief objectives of late nineteenth-century revivalist writers.  Cuchulain, above all, provided one of the central templates for a re-envisioned view of national character and heroic endeavour for Standish O’Grady, Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats.  This lecture will consider how the “Cyclops” episode at once appropriates and recasts the complex dynamics of the multiple plots centring on Cuchulain with their warring emphases on self-assertion, honour, unimpeachable masculinity, cross-gendering, intransigence, and failure.

Professor Anne Fogarty holds the chair of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin and is Head of the UCD School of English, Drama and Film. She is co-editor with Dr Luca Crispi of the Dublin James Joyce Journal.

Wednesday 6th February 2013, 12.30 – 1.30pm
‘Between Commentary and Eternity’: Annotating Dante and Joyce

Prof. Sam Slote, TCD 

The act of annotations implies some deficiency in the text that the annotations then purport to correct. Either the reader is insufficiently learned to cope with the text’s allusions, or the text is insufficiently accessible and cannot be trusted on its own without the mediation of the annotator’s skills and knowledge. Drawing on my experiences annotating Ulysses, I will discuss the commentary traditions around both Dante and Joyce to examine what annotation invariably omits and distorts in the service of explaining a literary text.

Prof. Slote is one of Ireland’s leading Joycean Scholars. He has co-edited five volumes on Joyce: Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce (1995); Genitricksling Joyce (1999); How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’ (2007); Renascent Joyce (2013); and Derrida and Joyce: On Totality and Equivocation (2013).  His annotated edition of Ulysses was published in 2012 by Alma Classics; this contains 9,000 all-new annotations to Joyce’s text.

Prof. Slote was one of three academic coordinators for the 2008 International James Joyce Symposium at the Université François-Rabelais in Tours, France and one of the organisers of the 2012 International James Joyce Symposium, which was hosted by both TCD and UCD.  In 2009 Prof. Slote was elected to a six-year term as a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation.