“Ulysses 100: when a book outlives its country”

Michael O’Sullivan

***All are welcome***

Abstract:
Declan Kiberd, Ireland’s greatest living Joyce scholar entitled his last book on Ireland “After Ireland”. What is he getting at? Has Ireland somehow disappeared? Of course, Kiberd is only echoing a trope of disappearing statehood common among Irish writers – Yeats called it no country for old men, Beckett never could cast his Irish characters on anything definitively and geographically of Ireland, Mangan makes it Siberia, even Heaney’s greatest book on Ireland “Death of a Naturalist” speaks of a dying to the land he had known. Where are we then with Ireland in 2022 with Joyce and Ulysses, a book published in the year of Ireland’s independence? Joyce never wrote of the new Ireland. He looks back to its decaying grandeur and also to a kind of disappearance. In this talk I will speak informally – through recollecting on both public and personal voices – about where we are today in Ireland with Ulysses and Joyce.

Bio:
Michael O’Sullivan has taught on literature and language for universities in Ireland, the UK, the US, Japan and Hong Kong. He was a professor in the department of English at CUHK until January, 2022. O’Sullivan has published many books, including Cloneliness: on the reproduction of loneliness (Bloomsbury); The Humanities and the Irish University (Manchester University Press); Weakness: a literary and philosophical history (Bloomsbury); The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a philosophy of the flesh (Continuum); Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism, and Belief (Peter Lang); Affecting Irishness: Negotiating Cultural Identity within and beyond the Nation (Peter Lang). He has also published widely on literature and related fields in such journals as Parallax, Mosaic, Textual Practice and Nottingham French Studies.