ULYSSES AND US - THE ART OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN JOYCE'S MASTERPIECE

Declan Kiberd, a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin, offers an audacious new take on Joyce's classic modern novel. Ulysses, he argues, is not an esoteric tome for the scholarly few but rather a work written both about and for the common person, offering a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life in the modern world. Kiberd progresses through each of Ulysses's episodes and demonstrates that the aura and mystique surrounding the novel are unfounded: Joyce's ultimate goal was to create a book that celebrated the everyday. His seemingly banal hero, Leopold Bloom, embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd claims, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer, Dante, and the Bible"all of which Joyce drew on in the writing of his book.