In Joyce’s Ulysses, a wholesale rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey, the ancient epic of the 10-years-long homecoming of a legendary Greek voyager becomes the story of a single day in the life of a middle-aged, early 20th Century Dubliner named Leopold Bloom. But in foregrounding the giving and taking of hospitality, both the novel and the epic show how hospitality may be undermined by treachery. In Homer’s epic, treacherous hospitality often entails violence - as when the one-eyed giant Polyphemos literally eats his guests for dinner. In Ulysses, guests and host betray each other without drawing a single drop of blood. By looking closely at Joyce’s novel, this lecture will consider how delicate is the fabric of trust that hospitality weaves, and how easily it may be ripped apart.

This lecture is drawn from James Heffernan’s new book, Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature, just published by Yale University Press. Professor Heffernan will be available to sign copies of his book after the lecture.