Please RSVP here.

Few works of literature are as closely linked to specific physical space as Ulysses is linked to Dublin. Throughout Ulysses, named characters often stand at or walk past a clearly specified, mappable point: an intersection, address, or business. In response, the novel is mapped, guidebooks to Joyce’s Dublin are published, and Bloomsday celebrants reenact scenes at the locations where they are set. Analyses of this aspect of Ulysses often characterize Joyce or the reader as city surveyor, census taker, or local. In contrast, I consider this mappable detail in relation to the network of informants and police that appears throughout Ulysses. Contrasting the Dublin of Ulysses with the London of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I argue that Joyce’s representation of Dublin and many of its residents interpellates readers into the novel’s intelligence subplot. By framing readers as complicit in this source of conflict in the novel, Ulysses models a decolonial method of reader manipulation and (dis)identification.

Eric A. Lewis is a lecturer in the Department of English at Georgia State University. His research focuses on readers' relationships with characters in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Global Anglophone fiction, especially out of Ireland and South Africa. His work has been published in Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. His book manuscript, Complicit Reading, argues that postcolonial novels use a variety of narrative techniques to complicate reader-character relationships and frame readers as complicit in conflicts in the novel and in the novel's real historical context. He also cohosts the Ulysses discussion podcast tipsyturvy Ulysses with Shinjini Chattopadhyay and Wendy Truran.