This is the fourth installment in our COVID Check-Ins series, in which we feature videos by various Joyceans from around the world to update us on how they are handling the COVID pandemic, how their community is responding, and how it has affected their teaching/research.
In this entry, Dr. Sam Slote, provides an update from Dublin Ireland, and gives us a brief tour of Dublin’s vacant streets and buildings. Sam works as a professor at Trinity College Dublin and has published a variety of works on both Joyce and Beckett.
Sam provides a brief discussion of Joyce’s belief that getting to the heart of Dublin meant getting to the heart of all cities; and how, in its current emptiness, Dublin remains every city. Sam then goes to touch on Bloom’s definition of nation in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses: “[…]the same people living in the same place […] [o]r also living in different places.” Sam asserts similarly that we are all living in the same place, precisely because we are all living in different places.