Liam Lanigan joins us to talk about trams in Ulysses. Liam is an assistant professor of English at Governors State University in South Chicago. Liam is the author of a 2014 monograph, James Joyce, Urban Planning and Modernism and an essay in the recent Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies.

Eric dragged Liam onto the show to nerd out at Wendy and Shinjini about trams, the form of Dublin-specific public transit that features prominently throughout Ulysses. We discuss Joycean community, the localized individual experience of reading Ulysses in terms of where you’re from, and the history of Dublin’s tramways, all before even getting into the text itself. We try to find optimism about public transit and are ultimately driven to other texts, including perhaps an iconic movie musical to celebrate the communitarian, posthuman potential of the tram.

Libations:

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Theme song: “Come on Over” by Scalcairn, via Blue Dot Sessions

Special thanks to Carin Goldberg, whose cover design for the Gabler edition of Ulysses inspired our logo.