In this special episode Alice, Lex and Adam geek out with the man who—Joyce aside—has probably been cited more than any other in our podcast: Professor Declan Kiberd. Professor Kiberd is the author of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, as well as the introduction to the Penguin Classics official partner edition.

Buy Ulysses and Us: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780571242559/ulysses-and-us-the-art-of-everyday-living

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In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary criticism, Ulysses and Us offers revolutionary insights to the scholar and the first-time reader alike.

Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of the literature upon which Joyce drew in writing Ulysses, such as Homer, Dante and the Bible.

Declan Kiberd is the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which won the Irish Times Prize in 1995. It is one of the most influential works on Irish culture published in the last twenty years. His Irish Classics came out in 2000 and won the prestigious Lannan Prize in the USA. He is the Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin and is a widely respected broadcaster, critic and reviewer.

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A student of environmental policy at Sciences Po-Paris, Alice McCrum runs programming at the American Library in Paris. 

In between fits of Joycean nerdery, Dr. Lex Paulson is Executive Director of the School of Collective Intelligence at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco. An adopted Parisian, he teaches at Sciences Po-Paris and writes on the past and future of democracy.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, Paris. He is the author of the novel Feeding Time, available in French as Défense de nourrir les vieux.

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