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.