BLOOMSDAY IN MELBOURNE
A Day With A Chapter: Deep Diving With Sirens
Sat, 28 Mar
|Metropolitan Hotel
Join Joyce experts Bruce Beswick and Frances Devlin-Glass for a day with Sirens, one of the most pivotal and moving chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses, in which Joyce experiments with musical form in narrative fiction.
Time & Location
28 Mar 2020, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Metropolitan Hotel, 36-42 Courtney St, North Melbourne VIC 3051, Australia
About the event
The chapter invites us to participate in Dublin's rich musical culture in a pub that is also used for concerts, and where all the barflies have their own party pieces to perform. It is also a profoundly moving chapter because of the emotional challenges the imminent events at 4pm entail for Bloom. How does Bloom keep his failing spirits up? What are we to make of the musical culture of Dubliners?
This chapter alienated the ever-patient Harriet Shaw Weaver and the less patient and opinionated Ezra Pound, his publishers. So, it was a particularly bold and daring venture. Joyce complained to several people that in writing the chapter he lost his lifelong love for music because his technique penetrated the contrivances of music and he understood better how powerfully it manipulated the emotions. Fortunately, it was not a permanent disillusionment. How well does his literary experiment work?
Session 1: Getting…