To mark Bloomsday at the EUI, Prof Richard Bourke (University of Cambridge) will give a talk on ‘history as nightmare’ to be followed by the presentation of a major new biography of Joyce by the late scholar Frank Callanan, James Joyce: A Political Life (Princeton U P, 2026)
'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake'. So declares Stephen Dedalus one of the central characters in James Joyce's great modernist novel, Ulysses, set in Dublin on 16 June 1904. The day is now known as Bloomsday and is named for the book's other protagonist, Leopold Bloom, the Catholic-Protestant Dubliner of Hungarian Jewish extraction.
9.30 - 11.00 History as the Nightmare from which we are Trying to Awake: Enlightenment Approaches to the Past.
Speaker: Richard Bourke (University of Cambridge)
Modern history is often seen as an oppressive inheritance. In response to his experience of Irish conditions as a living nightmare, Stephen Daedelus in Joyce’s Portrait longed for liberation. But for an earlier tradition of historical thought, emancipation was happening or had already taken place. That tradition took the form of universal histories, styled philosophical histories in the eighteenth century. Contributors to this genre included Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, and Hegel. For each of these figures, history was delivering humanity from domination. Opinion divided on the causes advancing emancipation. Domestic commerce, overseas trade, the centralised state, and the revival of learning were all identified as key drivers of change. But so too was the medieval institution of chivalry, which challenged the power politics of feudal society. This lecture will reconstruct the arguments of philosophical historians – from Voltaire to Adam Ferguson and John Millar – who sought to ascertain the dynamics that formed post-Roman Europe. It will conclude by asking why this question mattered, addressing how the successors of these French and Scottish thinkers sought to unravel the meaning of past.
Richard Bourke FBA is Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Among his many publications is his biography of the great Irish political thinker, Edmund Burke: Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton 2015). His forthcoming book is provisionally entitled The Right Side of History.
11.30 - 13.00 Book presentation: James Joyce: A Political Life by Frank Callanan (Princeton U P, 2026)
Speakers
Bridget Hourican (Trinity College Dublin)
Richard Bourke (University of Cambridge)
Peter Kennealy (ex EUI)
The book: The young James Joyce (1882–1941) was forged in the smithy of Irish political controversies, and he took into his European exile a depth of political insight unrivalled among his fellow modernists. In this biography of Joyce in his youth and early exile, acclaimed Irish historian and biographer Frank Callanan reveals a Joyce who is markedly more politically conscious, informed and complex than the Joyce of Richard Ellmann’s classic account. Written in a sparkling style and rich with historical insights, Callanan’s deeply researched biography is the first sustained account of how Joyce’s Irish and European political and cultural context shaped his life, thought, and writings.
The author: Frank Callanan (1956–2021) was an Irish barrister and historian. His books include The Parnell Split, 1890–91, a narrative of the last year of Parnell’s life, and T. M. Healy, a biography of Parnell’s principal adversary in the Split. He edited The Literary and Historical Society 1955–2005, a history of the debating society of University College Dublin, to which James Joyce belonged. He also wrote and produced, with Ruán Magan, the 2022 documentary 100 Years of Ulysses.
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