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Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living [Hardcover]

Declan Kiberd
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Faber and Faber (4 Jun 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0571242545
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571242542
  • Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 15.2 x 3.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 382,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Declan Kiberd
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Product Description

Book Description

Declan Kiberd explains why James Joyce's great modernist masterpiece is in fact a book that can teach ordinary people how to live better lives.

Product Description

Ulysses continues to be one of the central books of the twentieth century and this is an audacious new take on it. It was never meant to be an abstruse a book for the elite, argues Declan Kiberd. It is a book for the common people, and offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the book’s hero, 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 Homer, Dante and the Bible (on all of which Joyce drew in the writing of his book).

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.4 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Enthusiastic, But Not A Beginner's Guide, 4 July 2009
By 
G Reid (Edinburgh) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (Hardcover)
First of all, I enjoyed the book and it made me want to read Ulysses again (which I'm doing now), so it certainly achieved something. Declan Kiberd is an eloquent enthusiast and advocate for Joyce. And I loved his idea that you should treat Ulysses like a favourite album, and skip the bits you don't like - a refreshingly liberating approach to a book that can drag at times.

I was disappointed, though, that the author assumes you will know Ulysses fairly well already. So, for example, he refers to the "Ithaca" chapter, or the "Eumaeus" chapter, and you're supposed to know which they are. And in his discussion of the Oxen of the Sun sequence, in which Joyce parodies a number of old styles of written English, again, you're already supposed to know which bits parody which styles (I don't - I wouldn't know a parody or an original passage by John Henry Newman if my chips came wrapped in it).

And I wish Professor Kiberd didn't regard every activity that comes to nothing as "masturbatory", or every group activity like a sing-along as a form of orgasm. But maybe that's what studying Joyce does to you?

It's a good read if, like me, you're an amateur fan and want some insights and a good reason to take the original down from the shelves. But does anyone seriously think any more that reading a novel - even Ulysses - will change the way you live..?
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Keeping it real, 9 Dec 2009
By 
D. Lowbrow (Bohemian Riviera) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (Hardcover)
There seem to be two responses to "Ulysses" these days. The first is to proclaim the work's awesomeness by citing Joyce's exquisite mastery of language and form. The other is to complain about how hard it is to read and to conclude that the man was a pretentious charlatan. You wouldn't know it from reading the reviews for "Ulysses" on this site, but there exists another way of responding to "Ulysses": there are people out there who love "Ulysses" not as a towering colossus of the western canon, but as a beautiful and moving work of literature. Some of us love "Ulysses" in the same way that many people love "Pride and Prejudice" or "Lucky Jim" or "Cold Comfort Farm", as a work to keep coming back to for pure pleasure. It's even been rumoured that some hardcare fans waste entire evenings in the rapt study of Bloom's itinerary, in much the same way that Tolkien nerds pore over maps of Middle Earth.

Joyce made it clear what he thought was the chief glory of "Ulysses": that it presents the most completely and vividly realized character in world literature. He also insisted that he conceived that character sympathetically, calling him simply "a good man". Joycean scholarship, however, has presumed to know better. It is true that early critics of "Ulysses" were often willing to engage with the content, rather than with merely the form, of the book. Unfortunately, social snobbery often prevented perceptive early critics like Wyndham Lewis and Harry Levin from appreciating the humanity of Joyce's cast of impecunious provincials. Levin, in his otherwise excellent early study of Joyce's oeuvre, goes so far as to call Bloom a "pathetic little man" (or words to that effect). Later critics have been less snobbish, but at the cost of abondoning all interest in "Ulysses" as a human drama and condemning it to a slow death at the hands theory-addled professionals and their increasingly baffled students.

Declan Kiberd's new book asks us not only to take a more sympathetic view of Joyce's hero, but also to read "Ulysses" in the same way that its principal models were read of old: as a guide for how to live our lives. In his first two chapters, Kiberd reminds us of how Joyce, uniquely for a high modernist, was sympathetic to the emerging middle class and its bourgeois values. Kiberd might have gone further here: he might have reminded us that while, say, TS Eliot espoused various forms of elitism and contempt for modernity, and while Ezra Pound wound up on Italian fascist radio frothing at the mouth about wicked Jews wrecking the world economy, Joyce portrayed with sympathy an astonishingly appropriate twentieth-century Everyman: a tolerant, deracinated, socially undistinguished Jew who works in advertising. (It's interesting that while he praises Joyce for extolling the type of common man whom his contemporaries held in contempt, Kiberd can't help but contrast an idealized Edwardian "civic bourgeoisie" with the apparently less virtuous masses of our own day. Like Joyce's sniffy contemporaries, Kiberd sees salt-of-the-earth virtue in the idealized masses of the past while holding his nose when confronted with the unwashed of his own day. I suspect Joyce would have found rather more to admire in the society of the early twenty-first society than does Kiberd.)

Kiberd's timely book makes a compelling case for reading "Ulysses" as a paean to the richness and dignity of everyday life. You may be less than convinced by his claim that "Ulysses" presents us with a set of instructions on how to live our lives, and you may wind up less sanguine than the author about the allegedly exemplary character of Bloom's life, but you'll find gems of wisdom here that will send you back to "Ulysses" afresh. (It's worth noting that the book contains readings of each of Ulysses's eighteen chapters that presuppose a certain familiarity with the novel. It may not, therefore, be the best introduction for the novice, but it would still be useful to have it at your elbow when attempting "Ulysses" for the first time.) If you care about "Ulysses", or think you might care given a little effort and guidance, buy this wonderful book.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Academic but readable, 3 Sep 2010
By 
T. J. Collcutt "Terry Collcutt" (Bletchingley, Surrey) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (Hardcover)
This is a scholarly but very enjoyable read, explaining clearly what Joyce was getting at and celebrating his many voices. It sent me straight back to the original and to investigate agenbite of inwit and the mystery of the fox burying his grandmother.
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