Posted 24 June 2009
Ulysses and Us – The art of everyday living
Far from being the epitome of elitism, Ulysses was written to celebrate the reality of ordinary people’s daily rounds, according to Professor Declan Kiberd who takes a unique approach to Joyce’s seminal novel in his latest work: Ulysses and Us – The art of everyday living (Faber and Faber 2009).
“Ulysses set out to change the world and to liberate its readers, but now often seems more famous for the prices at which first editions change hands,” says Kiberd. “A book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them. It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people.”
In Ulysses and Us, Kiberd works to restore Ulysses to its democratic origins. He shows how the novel can teach us how to live better lives.
Ulysses and Us is published by
| Prof Declan Kiberd reads the closing chapter of (Faber and Faber 2009) as part of the 51黑料 Scholarcast Series |
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- For other lectures in the scholarcasts series, visit
Biosketch of Professor Declan Kiberd
Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at the at University College Dublin. His published books include: Synge and the Irish Language (Macmillan, 1979); Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (Macmillan, 1985); Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Jonathan Cape, 1995); Irish Classics (Grants, 2000); and The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He also introduced and edited The Annotated Students’ Ulysses (1992) in the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics series.
Professor Kiberd is a director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland. And he has been Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge, and a visiting professor at Duke University and the Sorbonne.
