OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, published in 1959, was hailed by Anthony Burgess as ‘the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century’. Frank Kermode thought the book would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a prediction that was, if anything, too cautious. The biography won the National Book Award and durably secured Joyce’s standing as a pre-eminent modernist.
Zachary Leader will discuss his new book, Ellmann’s Joyce, in conversation with Hermione Lee. The book offers a ‘biography of a biography’, tracing how Richard Ellmann came to Joyce, secured the cooperation of the family and estate, assembled papers and interviews, managed publishers, thwarted competitors, and balanced narrative with literary analysis. Leader also examines the biographer himself—publicly celebrated and privately admirable, yet with a startling secret life—and sets out a broader case for Ellmann’s intellectual and artistic claims, and for the value of literary biography more generally.
