Episode 8
Multimedia Affairs
Featuring Philip Kitcher
Audio episode · 17 min
Philip Kitcher on Ulysses
Members get every audio series, film and essay on Rebind
Eight in the morning at seven Eccles Street, and a man is feeding the cat before he feeds his wife. Calypso, the fourth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, is where Leopold Bloom walks in, and Philip Kitcher reads its easy pages the way Bloom reads the cat: slowly, for clues. He follows Bloom to the butcher's and into a daydream of an eastern city, and asks a question most readers skip: whose words are these, and what else is in this man's head besides words? The chapter ends with the Odyssey in view, and Kitcher quarrels with the parallel before making a larger claim about so ordinary a hero.