Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece

by Declan Kiberd

Overview

Why James Joyce's great modernist masterpiece is in fact a book that can teach ordinary people to live better lives.

Declan Kiberd, a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the University College Dublin, offers an audacious new take on Joyce's classic novel. Ulysses, he argues, is a work written for and about the common person, offering a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life in the modern world. In this passionate corrective to the widespread view of Ulysses as an esoteric tome for the scholarly few, Kiberd dispells the aura of academic mystique that has attached itself to the novel, opening our eyes to Ulysses as a celebration of the everyday and a model for living well in an unpredictable world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393339093
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/01/2010
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	739,876
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Declan Kiberd is a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the University College Dublin and the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which won the Irish Times Prize, and of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece. He lives in Dublin.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements IX

Note on the Text XI

How Ulysses Didn't Change Our Lives 3

How It Might Still Do So 16

Paralysis, Self-Help and Revival 32

1 Waking 41

2 Learning 53

3 Thinking 64

4 Walking 77

5 Praying 89

6 Dying 100

7 Reporting 113

8 Eating 124

9 Reading 137

10 Wandering 153

11 Singing 168

12 Drinking 181

13 Ogling 193

14 Birthing 206

15 Dreaming 222

16 Parenting 237

17 Teaching 248

l8 Loving 260

Ordinary People's Odysseys 277

Old Testaments and New 296

Depression and After: Dante's Comedy 313

Shakespeare, Hamlet and Company 331

Conclusion: The Long Day Fades 347

Notes 359

Index 381

Editorial Reviews

"[Kiberd is] one of our liveliest and most iconoclastic intellectuals. . . . Whether or not Ulysses is an example of wisdom literature, Ulysses and Us certainly is."

Irish Independent - John Banville

"Kiberd's book—lucid, learned, free of jargon and pretension—can make for a wonderful companion along the journey through Joyce's wondrous epic."

American Scholar - Sudip Bose

Kiberd's take on Ulysses should be on every undergraduate syllabus that includes Joyce's epic work, as it is an ideal introduction for the uninitiated—accessible, richly argued, funny and, in a kind of devil's advocacy fashion, begging for rebuttal. The author of the important and controversial Inventing Ireland argues that it is time to “reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of people” and fetch it back from “the more snobbish modernists,” who have conspired to give the book a reputation of being “unreadable by the ordinary people for whom it was intended.” Kiberd places the book in its time—“a world which had known for the first time the possibilities of mass literacy, a time when ordinary laborers read Shakespeare, Ruskin and Macaulay.” Ulysses, says Kiberd is “an epic of the bourgeoisie,” most of the book set in Dublin's public places, where men and women interrelate—the library, the cemetery, shops, pubs, a hospital. As Kiberd works his argument through each chapter of Ulysses, readers will be fascinated by the father-son reconciliation that is at the heart of the novel, and will forever appreciate how the pyrotechnics that dominate the second half are there simply to deepen the explorations of a very simple theme: how to live, and how, like Odysseus, to get home. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Kiberd, a professor at University College Dublin and author of three previous books on Irish literature, here argues that Joyce's famous novel was written in celebration of and intended to be read by the common man; he contends that the novel has been wrongly usurped by the academic elite and is therefore now considered unreadable by all but the most devoted scholars. His thorough analysis and criticism of the novel and Homer's Odyssey, however, undermine his argument by drawing from Joyce's life and close readings of Gaelic poetry and other literary texts which, while fascinating, are unfamiliar in such detail to the common reader of today. He is indefatigable in drawing perceptive connections between Joyce's work and the author's literary forebears, though, and makes a convincing case that reading Ulysses can be a transformative experience for those brave enough to attempt it. VERDICT Highly recommended for academic libraries catering to literature scholars for its widely referenced, close reading of the text, this should be considered an invaluable companion volume to Joyce's novel. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 45/1/09.]—Megan Hodge, Randolph-Macon Coll. Lib., Ashland, VA

Library Journal

"Starred Review. A daring work that might put a powerful book in the hands of its rightful readers."

Booklist

"For those who think a century is entitled to more than one 'game-changer,' there’s a fine new book of literary criticism called Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece."

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