Document Type

Conference Paper

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

General literature studies, Architectural design

Publication Details

Joyce 2018:XXVI International James Joyce Symposium, 11th – 16th June 2018, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Abstract

You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space.

James Joyce (Ulysses,p.31).

In Ulysses, on the morning of the 16th June 1904, Stephen Dedalus is striding on Sandymount strand, thinking about time and place as he moves. Later in the day, Leopold Bloom writes I. AM. A.with a stick in the sand on the same Sandymount strand. His scrubbed words will wash away with the tide but remain forever in the novel.

Using geotracking, I recreated the same ephemeral I. AM. A.in the same space, though in a different time. Like Bloom’s script, my words cannot be read in Sandymount, but they can be found on the internet, thanks to Runkeeper and MapBox. Have I run into eternity along Sandymount strand?

Cities are not just economic engines, and we all use them in different ways. Joyce was playing with the city of Dublin, while in exile, using it differently and for a different purpose to most of its citizens. He was having fun with it, and he was having fun with us. Maybe it’s time we had some fun with him.

This paper develops on from the pieces in my running blog, www.jj21k.com, Discover Dublin by Reading and Running. In his writings, Joyce created a version of Dublin. In my reading, my running, and in my writing, I compare Joyce’s Dublin to the Dublin of today noting the similarities, the differences and the developments. This paper examines what we can find out in the comparisons.

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