Ronan McDonald on One Hundred Years of Ulysses
Christopher Menz
(presenter),
2022
25493323
2022
single work
podcast
'In this week’s ABR podcast, listen to Ronan McDonald discuss one hundred years of James Joyce’s Ulysses, among the most famous books of the twentieth century. McDonald, who is the Gerry Higgins Chair in Irish Studies at Melbourne University, explains that Ulysses is a work with a complex publishing history, even setting aside its censorship record. To mark the Ulysses centenary, Cambridge University Press has republished a splendid facsimile of the original version of Ulysses, raising new questions about the book we thought we knew ' (Production summary)
'In this essay, I show that J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is shaped fundamentally by an engagement with Joyce’s Ulysses. However, the relationship between the two does not reveal itself in the rewriting of Joyce’s ‘Penelope’ that Costello’s literary and feminist reputation relies on, but through a range of references to ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, the ninth episode of Ulysses set in the National Library of Ireland and populated exclusively by men. Elizabeth Costello alludes to ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, I argue, because its philosophical dialogue, its dramatic form, its preoccupation with creativity, its investment in the life and reputation of the writer, and its attentiveness to the materiality of writing, offer Coetzee a model for his literary-philosophical experiments of the period. Drawing on archival evidence and published sources, the essay explores the apparent contradiction between Costello’s avowed feminist reclamation of Molly Bloom and the consistent intertextual engagement with ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, positioning the question of gender centrally within Coetzee’s broader engagement with philosophy in this period.' (Publication abstract)
'Joyce famously boasted that you could rebuild Dublin from the pages of his epic, Ulysses, the most admired novel of modernity. The play, Getting up James Joyce’s Nose , takes up this challenge: could you reconstruct the smell of Joyce’s Dublin 1904 from the pages of Ulysses? Resoundingly its scripters claim, ‘Yes, Yes, Yes!’ To notice the insane meticulosity of his interest in smell, the Cinderella of the senses, and the sense most likely to be considered beneath notice by literary artists, is to be caught into Joyce’s radicalism as a thinker and his surreal comedy, and to engage with him as an artist in new ways.' (Production summary)
