Bloomsday June 16, 2010

Bloomsday, synonymous with James Joyce is the most important honours day at University College Dublin, the alma mater of the great 20th century author. Among this year's recipients were from left, John Bowman, Matt Dempsey, Jürgen Habermas, Tom Arnold and Colm Tóibín (From the Irish Times; photograph by Brenda Fitzsimons)

"For me, Joyce, the itinerant European author, combines things in Ulysses that are otherwise seldom encountered together. He combines the artifice of a highly self-reflective, aesthetically uncompromising modern novel whose allusions are almost indecipherable with an unmistakable, though by no means uncritical, attachment to the all-pervasive ethos of his Irish native country. The novel is a declaration of love to the streets and pubs of Dublin and to the rich tradition and spirit of the country. It could be that this mixture is gaining a new resonance in times of “glocalisation”, that is especially in places where the local is entering into strange combinations with the global." (Jürgen Habermas).