"Too often the papers of academic experts are addressed only to their peers in a jargon that seeks to mimic the rigorous discourse of the sciences: such criticism is published only in expensive volumes destined for purchase by libraries and not by the common reader."
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"Reading Ulysses is undeniably challenging, yet many of the jobs which are done by ordinary people are as complex and exacting as any analysis of that book. Walter Benjamin observed that it would become increasingly difficult for children in a mass culture to find their way back to the exacting silence of a text. The challenge posed for many by Ulysses in 1922 proved prophetic of that issued by many other books now. Yet Ulysses was designed to produce readers capable of reading Ulysses - a sentence which is not the tautology it seems - with the very difficulty intended by Joyce as an intrinsic part of the experience. It offers not only a text but a training in how to decode it."

"The popular reading can not only be enriched over time by the learned one, but it can also enrich the learned interpretation. Scholarly notes and commentaries on Ulysses, ostensibly designed to help readers, too often scare them off with displays of arid pedantry or institutional power. But this is a book with much to teach us about the world - advice on how to cope with grief; how to be frank about death in the age of its denial; how women have their own sexual desires and so also do men; how to walk and think at the same time; how the language of the body is often more eloquent than any words; how to tell a joke and how not to tell a joke; how to purge sexual relations of all notions of ownership; or how the way a person approaches food can explain who they really are."

"The tragedy of the twentieth century was the replacement of a public-spirited bourgeoisie, not with a fully enfranchised people, but with a workforce now split between overpaid experts and underpaid service providers. The world so lost turns out to have been far better than that which replaced it. The world of pub, cafe, civic museum and national library produced social democracy, modernist painting and Ulysses. The world which supplanted it can generate only the identikit shopping mall, the ubiquitous security camera and the celebrity biography. The middle class has no real public culture or artworks which critique its triumph, because it has assimilated all the oppositional forces of modernism, by reducing them to mass entertainment. Now the streets are places not of amenity but of danger, through which nervous people drive in locked cars from one private moment to another."

"How can a book like Ulysses have been so misread and misunderstood? How was it [been] taken as a product of a specialist bohemia against which it was in fact in open revolt? Why has it been called unreadable by the ordinary people for whom it was intended? The legend of its forbidding difficulty has scared readers off, 'but so has the silly notion of its monumental perfection: as one critic writes, ‘each chapter, where not one false note, not one error, not one thing to regret is discernible’. How Joyce would have laughed at that! The Irish novelist Roddy Doyle was nearer the mark when he said that many passages stood in dire need of an editor. A young art lover like Sylvia Beach, intimidated by Joyce’s reputation, was in no position to warn him that some episodes go on too long."

"When after World War II bohemia broke out of the ghetto and became the new middle-class lifestyle, the assumption behind Ulysses that there was never any deep-rooted conflict between bohemian and bourgeois helped to secure its speedy assimilation to the literary canon. But it was the corporate university - and not the liberated individual reader - which took over the work of interpretation. That university praised Joyce as the supreme technician and ignored Ulysses as a modern example of wisdom literature. However, modernism, like any other great movement of art, is full of lessons."
-Declan Kiberd