This document outlines a presentation on how foot and mouth disease references in James Joyce's Ulysses invoke questions of Irish nationalism. The presentation covers how Joyce broke from Yeats in focusing on everyday concerns, debates on whether Joyce was a nationalist or traitor, analyses of foot and mouth disease references in the novel in historical context, and close readings of key passages. It aims to show how Ulysses experiments with nationalist literature while taking a dialogic position that left Joyce open to criticism from different sides.

1. How the ‘foot and mouth
leitmotif invokes the national
question in Ulysses. Or why
Ulysses IS a nationalist text.

2. Presentation Outline:
1. The art of the quotidian: the break between
Joyce and Yeats.
2. Joyce Nationalist or traitor?
3. Foot and mouth: literary leitmotif &
historical reality.
4. Foot and mouth: it’s the key, it’s the secret.
5. Theoretical précis.
6. Close reading and critical analysis.
7. Conclusions.
8. Q&A.

3. The art of the quotidian: The break
between Joyce and Yeats.
• Quotidian: Adjective
1. Of or occurring every day; daily.
2. Ordinary or everyday, esp. when mundane.
Synonyms: daily - everyday - diurnal - ordinary –
commonplace
• Yeats: Often simple, plain, direct language yet held
back by Victorian mores and conventions. Highbrow
• Joyce: One step beyond assimilated the avante garde
work by revelling in the base and everyday: sex, food,
socialism, nationalism and micro socio-political
exchanges. Aesthetically highbrow but lowbrow
concerns.
http://www.youtube.com/wat
ch?v=iCCw2afIM08

4. Joyce nationalist or traitor?
Nationalist
Traitor
Emer Nolan
Seamus Heaney
Richard Ellman
David Lloyd

5. Foot and mouth: literary Leitmoif &
historical reality.
Foot and mouth in
1920s
• Foot and mouth mentioned 10 times
and inverted as foot in mouth once in
a novel of 265,000 words. Significant?
• Dairy farming significant part of Irish
economy both at Ulysses time of
writing and today now the building
bubble has burst.
• Foot and mouth as metaphor for the
diseased Irish agrarian economy
which was in recovery from the Potato
famines AND under threat from foot
Economic Development in Ireland By C.H.
and mouth.
Oldham, Esq., Hon Secretary. Barrington
Lecturer on Political Economy, &c. Read
Wednesday,14thMarch,1900.
http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/2262/7854/1/js
sisiVolX548_567.pdf
The Irish Experience of Economic Lift Off Paul
Sweeney
http://www.ictu.ie/download/pdf/celtic_tiger.pdf

6. Foot and mouth: it’s the key, it’s
the secret.
Michael Billig: ‘Crises
do not, create
nation-states as nation states
…[instead , nations and the]
whole complex of beliefs,
assumptions, habits,
representations and practises are
produced in a banally mundane
way’

7. Theoretical précis.
• Duffy: Ulysses is ‘the starred text of
an Irish literature…the book of
postcolonial independence…a
guerrilla text [that has] all the time
been covertly operating as a
postcolonial novel’.
• David Lloyd: The ‘antirepresentational tendency in
Ulysses …[and] the [opposite]
hybrid quality of popular forms
exceed the monologic desire of
cultural nationalism’.

8. Close reading and critical analysis.
• Mr Deasy: ‘It’s about the foot and mouth
disease…There can be no two opinions on
the matter…They [Jews] sinned against
the light’ (pp32-34).

9. Close reading and critical analysis.
• ‘The Bullockbefriending Bard’ (p127)
• ‘Foot and mouth disease!...Great
nationalist meeting in Borris-in Ossory. All
balls! Bulldosing the public! Give them
something to bite on’ (p130).

10. Close reading and critical analysis.
• ‘foot and mouth disease. I want to give the
Citizen the hard word about it’ (p281).
• ‘Starts telling the Citizen about the foot and
mouth disease… and the Citizen sending
them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming
out with his sheepdip for the scab… L.
Bloom, who met with a mixed reception of
applause and hisses,… brought the
discussion to a close’ (pp301-304)

11. Conclusions.
• Ulysses an experiment in nationalist
literature presupposed in a ‘concrete’
Irishness.
• Dialogical position left him open to
criticism from both sides.
• ‘Joyce did not leave Ireland behind him in
any way except physically. (Richard
Ellman 1977:7)

12. Q&A.
1.Is Leopold Bloom or Stephen ‘hero’
Dedalus the hero of the novel?
2.Is Ulysses a success as a literary
experiment or a glorious failure?
3.Is Ulysses a nationalist, anti
nationalist text or an equivocatingly
dialogic text?