Bloomsday comes early for BC's Joyceans
Befitting a university with a distinguished Irish heritage and a leading Irish Studies program, Boston College has become a wellspring for James Joyce’s Ulysses, acclaimed as one of the 20th century’s greatest works, and one of the most challenging.
In 2007, BC was the setting for the first very Boston-based Bloomsday, an international celebration of Ulysses held every June 16, the date on which the book’s events occur. BC subsequently shifted its Bloomsday festivities to April, so as to incorporate them into the academic year.
This year, BC observed Bloomsday in November, thanks to undergraduates in the class on Ulysses taught by Joyce scholar Joseph Nugent, a professor of the practice in the English Department and Irish Studies faculty member. The students organized a moveable feast-like marathon reading of the book (an activity at many Bloomsday celebrations) at 18 locations across campus and even beyond, including Connolly House and the Chestnut Hill Reservoir; outside Corcoran Commons and 2150 Commonwealth Avenue; and in The Heights office, the Eagle’s Nest, and the Chocolate Bar—sites corresponding with locations in Dublin, where the novel’s events take place.
They also assembled a related website on which they planned to post a complementary podcast and movie, among other additions, and worked on individual Ulysses-oriented projects.
“@BCBloomsday” began a little after 8 a.m. on November 10 in Connolly House and ended at about 1 p.m. the next day in the English Department conference room in Stokes Hall, as Nugent, Cyrus Rosen ’25, Eileen Flynn ’23, and Grace McPhee ’23 took turns reading the concluding chapter, “Penelope,” its nearly 4,000-word final sentence ending with the rapturous “yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Nugent has been a force for exploring new dimensions of Ulysses and other Irish literature through modern technology. Working with students over the years, he has adapted Ulysses as an immersive virtual reality 3D game, “Joycestick,” and created a multi-media tour inspired by the book depicting Dublin in 1922, the year Ulysses was published. He’s by no means surprised by what the students can do, but he’s entirely grateful for it.
“It never fails to blow me away how interested they are in Ulysses—the class always fills up—and how enthusiastically they take on such a complex, demanding book,” said Nugent, noting that Rosen, an engineering major from Wilmington, Del., is using the DALL-E 2 artificial intelligence system to produce images for Ulysses based on specific passages from the book (“They’re not precise,” said Rosen, “but I think they capture the emotion in the text”).
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