O’Toole
Irish theater critic and scholar Fintan O’Toole will present a lecture entitled Mr. Bloom and the Buddha,
The lecture is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. Feb. 28 at Princeton University’s James M. Stewart ‘32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street. The lecture is part of a series presented by the university’s Fund for Irish Studies and is this year’s Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture.
Robert Fagles, for whom the annual memorial lecture is named, was a member of the Princeton faculty for 42 years in the Department of Comparative Literature and a renowned translator of Greek classics. His critically acclaimed translations of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey became bestsellers.
O’Toole’s lecture will focus on a looted Burmese statue of the Buddha that sits in a corner of the National Museum in Dublin. But it has a strange and significant presence in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where it features twice. He plans to show how a neglected object can help readers understand some key things about Joyce’s masterpiece, not least the relationship between Leopold Bloom and his unfaithful wife, Molly.
As a drama critic, O’Toole has written for The Irish Times, New York Daily News, Sunday Tribune (Dublin), and In Dublin Magazine. His books on theater span a wide range of topics, from his biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan to theater currently appearing on Irish stages. O’Toole is a visiting professor at Princeton University.
The Fund for Irish Studies, celebrating its 15th anniversary season and chaired by Princeton professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, affords Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.”
Upcoming Fund for Irish Studies series events include a lecture by writer and historian Erskine Childers set for March 28, a concert by Black 47 set for April 4 and a traditional Irish music concert by Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill set for April 25.
More information is online at arts.princeton.edu.
,
