With June 16 merely days away, we’re getting serious about Bloomsday here at the Rosenbach. Certainly more serious than Ulysses: this novel may contain passages of great beauty, but it also contains moments of great silliness. Consider “Calypso,” the fourth chapter and the reader’s first introduction to Leopold Bloom. “Calypso” features many of the themes and literary techniques that established …
James Joyce is said to have told his acquaintance, artist and writer Frank Budgen, that he wanted his novel Ulysses to “give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth, it could be reconstructed from my book.” Devoted Joyceans and Ulysses fans seem to have taken this as a challenge: …
Joyceans and longtime Rosenbach friends are well-acquainted with the history of how James Joyce’s Ulysses ran afoul of the Comstock Law, which prohibited use of the postal service to mail “obscene” literature among other things. The magazine The Little Review, which published the first chapters of Ulysses serially up until the “Nausicaa” episode in 1921, was brought …
The Rosenbach 2008-2010 Delancey Place Philadelphia, PA 19103 Contact: Sara Davis Phone: 215-732-1600 x 132 Email: [email protected] Re-Joyce: The Rosenbach Celebrates James Joyce with its Annual Bloomsday Festival PHILADELPHIA, April 27, 2017—June 16 is observed around the world as a celebration of James Joyce and his epic Ulysses, a novel that has been called everything from …
Join us on beautiful Delancey Place for the Rosenbach’s annual Bloomsday celebration on June 16, the day the world celebrates Leopold Bloom’s fictional journey through the streets of Dublin, as imagined in James Joyce’s epic Ulysses.
Today is the day after Bloomsday, but I wanted to squeeze in a Bloomsday blog post anyway. (Technically,since the day described in the book ends after midnight, maybe June 17 could be grandfathered in a little?) This year we extended our Bloomsday festival into the historic house: facsimiles of passages from the manuscript were spread …
This year Bloomsday fell on a Sunday, and not just any Sunday, it was also Father’s Day. In the over twenty years of Bloomsday programs at the Rosenbach we have never had so many readers under 10-years-old! Fathers and their children “rejoyced” together in reading Ulysses for an audience of over 1,400 people. This was …
Things are busy around here today, so no time for a long post. If you haven’t already started, there probably isn’t time to read Ulysses by tomorrow, but you can always check out the BBC’s Cheat’s Guide to Ulysses if you missed Bloomsday 101 last night (plus it features a comment from Stephen Fry). You …
Unsurprisingly, the focus around here for the past week was Bloomsday. Everything went really well; thank you to all of you who packed the house for Ulysses 101 on Monday, Declan Kiberd’s talk on Tuesday, and for the readings themselves yesterday. The fact that we moved to our Bloomsday rain location spared the city from …
Great minds think alike! No sooner had I posted my Bloomsday heads-up, when I received a guest blog post about Ulysses from Rosenbach trustee Steven Rolfe, MD. He has some very helpful and practical suggestions on how to survive and enjoy reading Ulysses, so read on for his post: “I came to Ulysses relatively late …