Irish Worlds Seminar | Ulysses' Scar: Joyce's Odysseys and the Politics of Place with Luke Gibbons
This talk revisits Joyce’s formulation of ‘Jewgreek GreekJew,’ inquiring why Joyce needed the Odyssey to make Bloom feel at home in Dublin. The argument is that as the so-called founder of geography, Homer provided a model of attachment to real locations in which the self is inextricably bound up with its surroundings, As against the ‘deep subjectivity’ attributed to Joyce’s characters in the first generations of Joycean criticism, his fiction is better understood as exploring ecologies of land, language and the self, grounded in the politics of time and place.
This talk features Luke Gibbons, who most recently was a Professor of Irish Studies at Maynooth University (Ireland) and will be followed by an interview with Gibbons and Yale Professor Joe Clearly.
The Irish Worlds Seminar is generously sponsored by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; The Whitney Humanities Center; and the European Studies Council of the Yale MacMillan Center.
Speakers
Luke Gibbons has taught as Professor of Irish Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland (2009-2016), and at the University of Notre Dame, USA (2000-2009). Among hios publications are James Joyce and the Irish Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2023); Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism and Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2015); Charles O’Conor: His Life and Works, co-edited with Kieran O’Conor (Four Courts Press, 2015); Limits of the Visible: Representing the Irish Great Famine (Quinnipiac University/Cork University Press, 2015); Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Gaelic Gothic (Arlen House, 2003); The Quiet Man (Cork University Press, 2002); Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork University Press, 1996); and Cinema and Ireland, co-authored with Kevin Rockett and John Hill (Routledge, 1987). He was a contributing editor to the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, general editor, Seamus Deane (Faber/Field Day, 1991).
- Humanity