James Joyce
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Sweets of Sin
“… a volume of peccaminous pornographical tendency entitled Sweets of Sin, anonymous author a gentleman of fashion…” “…I wonder what kind is that book he brought me Sweets of Sin by a gentleman of fashion some other Mr de Kock …” In the tenth section of “Wandering Rocks,” the tenth episode of Ulysses, we rejoin…
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Ep. 161 – Yogibogeybox
We finally learn the weirdest thing that Joyce and Gogarty got up to. Topics in this episode include Giacomo Joyce and dirty love letters, the pain of not being invited, Æ’s New Songs and Joyce’s exclusion from it, why Æ Russell hasn’t released any new songs this year, Aristotle’s experiment, the meaning of nookshotten, Shakespeare…
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Ep. 160: Anne Hath A Way
No, not that Anne Hathaway. The Shakespearean one. Topics in this episode include Socratididion’s Epipsychidion, unparalleled pettiness, Stephen’s unfair characterization of Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway, why commentary about Anne Hathaway has been so problematic historically, Anne as a Gertrude stand-in, how we can learn factual information about the Shakespeares’ lives, sixteenth century age gap discourse,…
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The Most Historic Spot in All Dublin
“History in ‘Wandering Rocks’ is not only colonial history registered in the fabric of the city; it is also quite specifically colonial history distorted and dominated by Protestant and Anglo-Irish interpretations.” – Len Platt The eighth section of Ulysses’ tenth episode, “Wandering Rocks” opens with “two pink faces” greeting a third in some dark, dusty…
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Ep. 159: AEIOU
Stephen Dedalus beats debt with this one simple trick! Topics incluce: “Scylla and Charybdis’” dialectic as metacommentary on Ulysses as a whole, the perils of offending the gods of the sea, Stephen takes offense to Æ, Stephen’s many debts, the artistic value of green room gossip, contrasting Æ and Mr. Deasy, Stephen as the ship…
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Who was the real Almidano Artifoni?
This post is a part of an occasional series on the real people behind the characters in Ulysses. In the sixth vignette of Ulysses’ tenth episode, “Wandering Rocks,” we see Stephen Dedalus chatting with Almidano Artifoni, a music maestro with comically starchy trousers. Their conversation is written entirely in untranslated Italian, so if, like me,…
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Ep. 158 – Hamnet
Stephen Dedalus finally gets to the fireworks factory. Topics in this episode include lots of Hamlet, Stephen introduces his theory of Hamlet, James Joyce’s Shakespeare sources, Elizabethan slang, Sackerson the bear, everything we know about the real Hamnet Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s reaction to his son’s death, how Hamnet’s death shows up in the works of Shakespeare,…
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The Superior, The Very Reverend John Conmee S. J.
“The tidal waterway, the Anna Liffey, mother of Dublin, plays as ever her part in Joyce’s Dublin. As a creative force she is older and greater than Christ or Caesar. If Christ left Dublin the city would still exist. Man can invent fresh gods as he needs them and new gods would replace the old;…
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Ep. 157 – The Absentminded Beggar
Was Hamlet just distracted the whole time? Topics in this episode include: the continued character assassination of Mr. Best, Haines makes a return, Douglas Hyde’s poetry, the artistic ethos of the Celtic Revival, the political demands of the art scene in 1904 Dublin, Æ, symbolist poetry and Stéphane Mallarmé, the influence of Mallarmé on Joyce,…
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Ep. 156 – Horseness is the Whatness of Allhorse
Are you Team Aristotle or Team Plato? Topics in this episode include Charybdis, schoolboys and schoolmen, whether or not Plato was shallow, artists being rejected by Plato’s Republic, platonism v. neoplatonism, Aristotle’s view of art, Stephen’s dagger definitions, the Plato and Antisthenes’ thoughts on horses, horse v. horseness, Plato’s Forms, the ineluctable modality of the…