A Book for the Common Man

It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people ...

for whom Joyce intially intended it, says Declan Kiberd in a beautifully argued piece in The Times (and extract in fact from his new book Ulysses and Us : The Art of Everyday Living) explaining that :

The more snobbish modernists resorted to difficult techniques in order to protect their ideas against appropriation by the newly literate masses.

Nowhere is this reclamation more important than in the classroom, where he reckons :

Today’s students have been prevented by a knowing, sophisticated criticism from seeking such wisdom in modern literature. In it they seek mainly tricks of style, rhetorical devices, formal experiment and historical insight, but seldom if ever lived wisdom. The contemporary gulf between technique and feeling cries out to be bridged in the classroom, through the work of teaching and learning.

Talking about Ulysses, don't you wish you had this first edition?