Annual Distinguished Guest Lecture
Date and time
Professor Catherine Flynn (University of California, Berkeley): "Circe" and the Phantasmagoria of Capitalism
About this event
Catherine Flynn is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley where she works on Irish modernist literature and culture in a European avant-garde context and on critical theory. She is the author of James Joyce and the Matter of Paris (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and editor of the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes (Cambridge University Press, 2022), as well as the forthcoming New Joyce Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She hosts the related podcast, U22. The Centenary Ulysses Podcast. She is also at work on a monograph about Flann O’Brien/Brian O’Nolan/Myles na gCopaleen and the young Irish State.
Talk Abstract
It is almost a century since Walter Benjamin used the term “phantasmagoria” to describe the largescale effects of the fetishized commodity. This talk reflects on the term from our contemporary critical moment through considering the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, James Joyce’s representation of the red-light district of Dublin. While the action of the episode is centered on Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, how can we understand its fleetingly represented other characters?
(Photo credit Yanina Gotsulsky)
NB This is an in-person event.
