A History and Experience of Bloomsday in Lisbon 2012-2022

Авторы

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2595-8127.v25i1p69-98

Ключевые слова:

Ulysses, Bloomsday, Lisbon

Аннотация

This text is an account of “Bloomsday”(a celebration of the day in which James Joyce’s Ulysses is set) in Lisbon in the years 2012-2022, from the perspective of the director of the event. I have always tried to interweave Ireland, Portugal and Brazil in the encounter with Joyce with ourselves and our sounds in language and music, with our diverse locations, and with the different translations of Ulysses. The vision has always been to combine entertainment and a subversive joy via music, performative readings and remarks on Ulysses, together with diving deep into the philosophical panorama and profound possibilities of experimenting with language through everyday characters and the experience of life and death within a simple story that encompasses Joyce’s “chaosmos.” Crucially, it is in reading and hearing the text aloud where one enters literature as reality and as a vivid experience. This text also brings up two fascinating reviews of Ulysses which were an inspiration for Bloomsday in 2022: one from 1922 by Shane Leslie (the son of a protestant Anglo-Irish landlord, who converted to Catholicism) where he referred to the book as “literary Bolshevism”; and the other from 1935 by Karl Radek (a Bolshevik leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917) who called it “a heap of dung, crawling with worms.” In their negative critique from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they nevertheless capture the revolutionary spirit and “epic of the human body” of the book in which we are still learning to catch up with and to flourish.

Биография автора

  • Bartholomew Ryan, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

    Is a philosopher and musician, and researcher at IFILNOVA, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is the coordinator of the research group ‘Forms of Life and Practices of Philosophy’. He has published various books and essays interpenetrating philosophy and literature, the most recent book being Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (co-editor, 2021); and he is the author of Kierkegaard Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno (Brill, 2014). He has taught at universities in Brazil, Berlin, Oxford, Aarhus, Dublin, Lisbon and Bishkek. He is currently writing a book called James Joyce: The Unfolding Art of Flourishing and Decay which will be published by Oxford University Press. In music, he released a solo album called Jabuti in 2022 (written in Brazil under the name Loafing Hero); leads the international band The Loafing Heroes (six albums released in 2009-2019); and is a member of the experimental audio formation Headfoot.

Библиографические ссылки

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McSmith, Andy. Fear and the Muse Kept Watch. The Russian Masters—from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein—Under Stalin. The New Press, 2015.

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Опубликован

2023-06-15

Как цитировать

Ryan, B. (2023). A History and Experience of Bloomsday in Lisbon 2012-2022. ABEI Journal, 25(1), 69-98. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2595-8127.v25i1p69-98