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Irish Examiner
20 hours ago
- Health
- Irish Examiner
Birth experiences: why care is needed before, during, and after giving birth
Ireland is becoming a better place to have a baby. That's according to the Irish Examiner National Women's Health Survey, conducted by Ipsos B&A, in which women who have had multiple births report a gradual improvement in care over time. However, there is still progress to be made. Some 41% of mothers said their first birth was difficult or complicated. Prenatally, 36% found healthcare professionals unwilling to consider alternative approaches to birth. Dissatisfaction was highest with postnatal care. One in three cited problems accessing lactation consultants and breastfeeding supports. Three in 10 feel there was a lack of information about postpartum recovery, and one in four said they didn't get enough advice about looking after their baby. Deirdre Daly, associate professor of midwifery and director of the Centre for Maternity Care Research at Trinity College Dublin. Deirdre Daly, an associate professor of midwifery and director of the Centre for Maternity Care Research at Trinity College Dublin, believes the maternity service lets women down when it doesn't give them adequate postnatal support: 'Mothers need to learn how to keep themselves and their babies healthy and well, They need to be told what is and isn't normal, so they can reach out for help, if needed. That's how they get off to the best possible start.' Tony Fitzpatrick, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Association's (INMO) director of professional services, says that many of the problems within maternity services are caused by a lack of staffing. Tony Fitzpatrick, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Association's (INMO) director of professional services, says that many of the problems within maternity services are caused by a lack of staffing. This lack extends to postnatal care, where the shortage of public health nurses and general nurses results in inadequate care for mothers and babies after they leave hospital. 'With regard to postnatal care, the INMO has highlighted shortfalls in both public-health-nurse and community-registered, general-nurse staffing levels, as well as the numbers of midwives providing care in maternity hospitals,' he says. 'INMO members have reported they are striving to meet basic care needs for newborns and their mothers, but that they are far too stretched to give mothers the level of care they are trained to provide.' What the INMO would like to see, he says, is 'a maternity service that places women, babies, families, and midwives at the centre of care'. Postnatal hubs Efforts are being made to create such a service. Daly sees the network of postnatal hubs that have opened around Ireland as a welcome development. Run by midwives, they currently operate in Cork, Kerry, Carlow-Kilkenny, Sligo, and Portiuncula in Galway. 'Our research shows women often feel invisible in the maternity service, particularly postnatally, when the focus moves from mother to baby,' says Daly. 'These hubs were set up as a pilot project in 2022 as a way of addressing that. For six weeks after birth and longer, if necessary, women can go to midwives with their questions and worries and midwives can identify and treat potential problems before they escalate.' Dr Cliona Murphy, chair of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Dr Cliona Murphy, chair of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, adds that plans are under way to open an additional eight hubs throughout 2025 and 2026. 'Each will deliver accessible, woman-centred postnatal care to mothers and babies,' she says. 'They will provide multi-disciplinary support in local settings, with services such as breastfeeding support, birth reflections, and debriefing, wound care and more.' There are other positive developments within the maternity service. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, women now have three care pathways to choose from, tailored to their individual clinical needs and preferences. There has also been investment in education and training, with clinical practice guidelines being developed in subjects such as care for women using a birthing pool for labour and birth. Chair of the Association for Improvements in Maternity Care Ireland (AIMS), Krysia Lynch, says there is much we could learn from other countries, citing Germany as an example: 'Women there see the same midwife at all their appointments and build up a relationship of trust with them. We would benefit from that continuity of care in Ireland.' She would also like us to emulate the French by including a postnatal pelvic check as standard: 'Women's pelvic health is so important for their general health and quality of life as they age.' The key to increasing women's satisfaction with the care they receive in the maternity system is ensuring that their voices are heard at all stages, according to Daly. 'Some 41% of first-time mothers find birth difficult or complicated,' she says. 'Nobody thinks they should lower their expectations or anticipate complications. Instead, we should aim to exceed their expectations by consulting them and considering their needs prenatally, during birth, and after they have their baby.' More support second time Stephanie Buckley is a 39-year-old mother of two from Tralee. Her oldest is three, and she was well taken care of when she was pregnant with him: 'My appointments and scans were great. I was listened to and cared for at all times.' It was during labour that things started to veer away from what she expected. Buckley's waters broke. Labour started, but then stalled: 'I was induced, and when he still didn't come out, I had to have a C-section.' She hoped for a different outcome with her second child, who is now four months old. 'But it went the same way,' she says. However, there was one big difference between the two experiences: The level of postnatal care: 'After my first baby was born, the midwives were great, but they were so busy they couldn't spend much time with me.' She saw a lactation consultant and appreciated the visit from her public health nurse: 'But I still had questions, particularly in relation to my C-section recovery, and would have liked more follow-up.' She got this with her second baby, because, in the meantime, a HSE-run postnatal hub opened in Tralee. 'It was everything I'd been looking for,' she says. 'At my first visit, I had a full debrief on the birth, was checked for postpartum depression, and the midwife looked at my wound. It was just about to get infected, but she caught it just in time.' Buckley returned to the hub two or three more times after that to get her wound checked and ask more questions. 'I didn't have to sit at home and wonder like I did with my first baby,' she says. 'There were people I could talk to. That was missing the first time around, that extra layer of reassurance and support.' Yvonne Harris, 39, has a three-year-old child and lives in Firhouse, Dublin. Photograph Moya Nolan Problems in labour Yvonne Harris, 39, has a three-year-old child and lives in Firhouse, Dublin. Harris felt cared for throughout her pregnancy. 'I was given good information and was always listened to,' she says. 'It wasn't until I went in to labour that things started to go wrong.' She was 1.5cm dilated when she arrived at a busy labour ward. 'Because I was in the early stages of labour and the ward was full, I was placed in a room at the end of the hall with women whose pregnancies were being monitored, but who weren't in labour,' she says. Her husband had to leave when evening came. 'I'm quiet and don't like to make a fuss, and because everyone was so busy, I wasn't checked on much.' When she was examined the next morning, she was fully dilated and was rushed to the delivery suite. Her daughter was born by vacuum delivery, but Harris retained the placenta. Attempts to remove it manually resulted in haemorrhaging, and she had to be operated upon. She now wonders if her birth experience led to postnatal depression. 'It kicked in when my daughter was six months old and I treated it with medication and counselling,' she says. 'Talking helped release the trauma I'd held on to from the birth.' Looking back, she questions if her complications might have been avoided if her labour had been managed differently. 'If I'd asked for help more or if there had been more staff to check on me, things might have been different.' Click here to read our National Women's Health Survey. The Irish Examiner Women's Health Survey 2025 Ipsos B&A designed and implemented a research project for the Irish Examiner involving a nationally representative sample of n=1,078 women over the age of 16 years. The study was undertaken online with fieldwork conducted between April 30 and May 15, 2025. The sample was quota controlled by age, socio-economic class, region and area of residence to reflect the known profile of women in Ireland based on the census of population and industry agreed guidelines. Ipsos B&A has strict quality control measures in place to ensure robust and reliable findings; results based on the full sample carry a margin of error of +/-2.8%. In other words, if the research was repeated identically results would be expected to lie within this range on 19 occasions out of 20. A variety of aspects were assessed in relation to women's health including fertility, birth, menopause, mental health, health behaviour, and alcohol consumption.
Irish Examiner
2 days ago
- Business
- Irish Examiner
Irish universities rank among global 800 for first time
Ireland's universities feature among the global top 800 for the first time in an 'outstanding' set of international league tables published on Thursday. With seven of the eight included universities improving their rankings this year, Ireland has been recognised by the QS World University Rankings as the country 'most improved' in Europe, and second most improved in the world, only behind Azerbaijan. Ireland's top-ranked university, Trinity College Dublin, remains within the top 100 globally, rising from 87 in 2025 to 75. University College Cork (UCC) has also, for the first time, ranked within the top 250 universities globally, leaping 27 places to its highest ranking in 10 years. In 2025, it was ranked at 273, compared to 246 in 2026. The university has put the jump of almost 50 places in under two years down to a collective effort from staff across the institution, as well as improvements across academic reputation, employment outcomes and in its research citation levels. UCC president Professor John O'Halloran said its position within the top 250 universities in the world was a key target in the university's strategic plan. "The ranking result reflects the dedication and hard work of all our staff and is one that our students, staff, and alumni all over the world can be proud of," he said. The QS World University Rankings 2026 ranks more than 1,500 institutions across 106 countries and territories, based on categories such as academic reputation, graduate outcomes, and research. QS senior vice president Ben Sowter said Ireland's "outstanding results" this year are "testament to the dedication of academics, administrators, and students across the eight universities from the country included in the ranking". UCC has for the first time ranked within the top 250 universities globally. Picture: Dan Linehan This year's set of rankings found Ireland outperformed many counterparts in Europe, ranking third on average for its employer reputation score, behind the Netherlands and Sweden. Every ranked Irish institution improved in the international students ratio indicator, which, according to QS, indicates Irish campuses are "increasingly benefiting from international networking opportunities, cultural exchanges and diverse learning experiences". While improvements in the academic reputation category were also noted, so too was the fact that all Irish universities fell or maintained their score from last year when it came to faculty for students. This makes student faculty, and the student experience, a key focus area for Irish higher education providers, QS said. "Universities have welcomed additional core funding in the government's budget for 2025 but noted that the €307m funding gap identified by government in 2022 will still not have been fully closed. "Universities need to continue to ensure students have access to necessary staff providing quality teaching." Trinity College Dublin provost Linda Doyle said: 'A sustainable funding model for higher education in Ireland is key to helping us to thrive. While increased core funding helps us to achieve our ambitions on the national and international stage, we need to see an absolute step-change in how universities and research are funded in Ireland.' Internationally, MIT retains its top position in the rankings for the 14th year in a row, followed by Imperial College London and Stanford University. Read More Over 250 children may have no school place, but minister refuses to confirm numbers
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Irish Times
Trinity climbs to 75th in world university rankings
Trinity College Dublin , Ireland's highest-ranked third-level institution, has jumped 12 places to 75th in the latest set of world university rankings, while Ireland is the most improved higher education system in Europe. The QS World University Rankings 2026 show that seven of Ireland's eight universities have climbed up the global league table, boosted by factors such as employer reputation and the rising proportion of international staff and students. For the first time all Irish universities now feature among the world's top 800. While Trinity is the highest ranked, it is followed by UCD (118th, up eight places), UCC (246th, up 27 places), University of Galway (284th, down 11 places), University of Limerick (401st, up 20 places) and Dublin City University (410th, up 11 places). READ MORE In addition Maynooth University has climbed the rankings (771-780th, up from 801-850) along with Technological University Dublin (781-790, up from 851-900). The QS World University Rankings 2026 evaluate more than 1,500 universities across 100 countries and territories. Rank in Ireland 2026 rank 2025 rank Institution 1 75 87 Trinity College Dublin 2 118 =126 University College Dublin 3 246 =273 University College Cork 4 284 =273 University of Galway / Ollscoil na Gaillimhe 5 =401 =421 University of Limerick 6 =410 =421 Dublin City University 7 771-780 801-850 Maynooth University 8 781-790 851-900 Technological University of Dublin Overall, MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, retains its top position for the 14th year, followed by Imperial College London (second) – led by former UCD president Prof Hugh Brady – and Stanford University (third). While there are more than a dozen world university rankings, the QS version is considered by education observers as one of the 'big three', alongside Times Higher Education and Shanghai's Academic Ranking of World Universities. Critics say university rankings are not an accurate measure of performance and neglect key areas such as the quality of teaching and learning. They remain influential internationally, however, in areas such as reputation, research and student choice. The rankings show Trinity College Dublin improved across key indicators used such as academic reputation, international faculty and graduate outcomes. Trinity's provost Dr Linda Doyle said the rankings news 'encourages us to be even bolder in our ambition for Trinity and, indeed, for Ireland – an ambition that should be championed and defended regardless of the rankings'. She said a sustainable funding model for higher education in Ireland was key to helping it thrive. 'While increased core funding helps us to achieve our ambitions on the national and international stage, we need to see an absolute step-change in how universities and research are funded in Ireland.' Universities have welcomed additional core funding in the Budget 2025, but noted that a €307 million funding gap identified by Government in 2022 is still not fully closed. Ben Sowter, senior vice-president at QS, said Ireland's 'outstanding results' showed the country's campuses were increasingly 'open and diverse, which benefits both domestic and international students, as well as employers seeking globally minded talent'. He said Ireland outperformed many European counterparts and global English-speaking student destinations in key areas such as employer reputation, international faculty and sustainability. Every Irish university also improved its international students ratio, reflecting growing international appeal and diversity on Irish campuses. Mr Sowter said general improvements across the board in academic reputation also showed the increased regard in which institutions' research and educational innovativeness is held. 'Improving the ratio of faculty to students, heightening intensity of research undertaken at universities and ensuring graduates are supported to go on to make meaningful impacts on society will help Irish universities keep improving and making positive contributions to both Ireland and the globe,' he said. Globally, the US remains the most represented system, with 192 universities, and sees more institutions rise than fall in this edition. China has continued its ascent with Peking University holding on to its 14th place, while Tsinghua University rose to 17th, and Fudan University climbed nine spots to 30th, signalling a strong research-led push.
Irish Post
3 days ago
- Business
- Irish Post
Businessman Dermot Smurfit receives honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin
BUSINESSMAN and philanthropist Dermot Smurfit has been awarded an honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin (TCD). The entrepreneur, with his brother Michael, built the family packaging firm, Jefferson Smurfit, into one of Ireland's most successful and internationally acclaimed public companies. Today it is the largest paper and packaging producer in the world. Pictured (l-r) Moira O'Brien, Sir Donnell Deeny, Dermot Smurfit, TCD Provost Dr Linda Doyle, Chancellor Dr Mary McAleese and Linda Ervine (Pics: TCD) Now in his 80s, and retired from executive management, Mr Smurfit continues to invest in businesses and sits as a non-executive director on a number of company boards. He is among Trinity College Dublin's 'most generous benefactors', although he 'does not like to publicise his giving' the college said this week. 'While preferring not to publicize his giving and averse to public recognition, he has been an exceptionally generous supporter of initiatives in health and higher education over decades,' a university spokesperson confirmed as they awarded him an honorary degree of the University of Dublin at TCD. Dermot Smurfit pictured with TCD Chancellor, former president of Ireland, Dr Mary McAleese Anna Chahoud, Public Orator of the University of Dublin, said Mr Smurfit had 'always embraced challenges, including the all-important task of saving companies and jobs. This is a man who cares for people and for a just cause.' "To us, he is an invaluable benefactor and advisor of our University, a member of the Provost's Council, and the generous and vocal supporter, at home and abroad, of the University's commitment to inspire future generations,' she added. Mr Smurfit was one of four people to receive an honorary degree this week. The renowned osteoporosis expert Moira O'Brien, Northern Irish judge Sir Donnell Deeny and Irish language champion Linda Ervine all received the honour from TCD Chancellor Dr Mary McAleese at a ceremony conducted in Latin in the historic Public Theatre. See More: Dermot Smurfit, Donnell Deeny, Linda Irvine, Moira O'Brien, TCD
Atlantic
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Canonization of James Joyce
When Richard Ellmann's James Joyce hit the shelves in 1959, the sheer size of the book (842 pages, 100 longer than Ulysses) was as dazzling as the degree of detail. Joyce, who had been dead for 18 years, vividly inhabited its chapters, getting drunk, going blind, spending money, spiting enemies, cogitating, and, of course, creating a series of works that immediately made literary history. Moving briskly across the first half of the 20th century (not just a single day in Dublin), Ellmann spun a tale about the formation of a writer whose name could be mentioned in the same breath as Homer's without irony. Ellmann owed his triumph, in part, to being in the right place at the right time. By the early 1950s, he had spent a year at Trinity College Dublin researching his prizewinning dissertation on William Butler Yeats, received a Ph.D. from Yale, and become an ambitious 30-something professor at Northwestern University. Yeats's widow was ready to provide introductions in Dublin; Joyce's most important patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and his dear friend Maria Jolas released a trove of unpublished letters. Stanislaus Joyce, his brother, had shared material from his diaries and unfinished memoir. Nelly Joyce, Stanislaus's widow, unleashed holy-grail-grade manuscripts; so did Jolas. And Sylvia Beach, a fellow American and the fearless publisher of Ulysses, was still knocking around Paris willing to entertain questions. From the April 1957 issue: Letters of James Joyce You also need charm, lots of it, to make a biography like James Joyce happen. Ellmann, a virtuosic schmoozer, could get people to do his bidding without ever seeming too pushy. A delivery of coal during the winter; some chocolates, cigarettes, cocoa, or tea in any season—accompanied by a carefully worded request, such offerings could go a long way when he needed to gain (or restrict) access to material. James Joyce (Ellmann wisely heeded his mother's advice to drop the subtitle, The Hawk-Like Man) was immediately recognized as a masterpiece—not just a comprehensive life-and-art account of Joyce, but a genre breakthrough. Developing a style that was at once detached and ornate, Ellmann works as a historical novelist, using facts as a springboard for a subtle psychological portrayal intertwined with layered critical interpretations. Consider, for instance, the moment when the young, unknown Joyce arrives in Rome to take a job at a bank. It's 1906, a few years after his voluntary exile from Ireland; Joyce is all but penniless at 24. Ellmann wants to capture the way the eternal city, strewn with ruins, acts on someone who is homesick. Joyce's 'head was filled with a sense of the too successful encroachment of the dead upon the living city,' he writes. 'There was a disrupting parallel in the way that Dublin, buried behind him, was haunting his thoughts.' Like the newly married, disillusioned Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch, the young, impressionable Joyce feels psychologically unmoored by his time in Rome. He loves and hates Ireland all at once, and out of this emotional struggle, he will end up producing 'The Dead,' the final story in Dubliners. It is set in Dublin, but through Ellmann, we come to appreciate that it is also a ghost story with Roman roots—and a prelude to the universal sweep of Ulysses. In his quest for a definitive biography of Joyce as a cosmopolitan artist, above the parochial fray, Ellmann downplayed Joyce's interest in politics. In fact, before Joyce ever published a book, he wrote newspaper articles and delivered lectures in Italian about Irish nationalism and his disdain for British imperialism in his native country, work that shed helpful light on his fiction. 'My political opinions,' he summed up in a letter to his brother, 'are those of a Socialist artist.' His work is saturated with references to Irish history, politics, geography, and culture—rich in allusions, both explicit and puzzlelike, to major figures and events. From the December 1946 issue: James Joyce Still, to say that Ellmann is to Joyce what James Boswell is to Samuel Johnson is not too big a stretch: He didn't arrive in time to befriend Joyce, but he got to the posthumous scene first; gathered fresh accounts; captured not just the context, but his subject's character and his creative process. Not least, Ellmann emerged, as Boswell did, with a mold-breaking portrait that has retained an enduring power over the readers and scholars who have followed. Ellmann the portraitist has now come in for a portrait of his own. (So did Boswell, though not until two centuries after his one-of-a-kind work was published.) In Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker, Zachary Leader—who has written engaging lives of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow—has cobbled together a curious two-part chronicle. Part one is a meticulously researched account, woodenly rendered, of Ellmann's not particularly colorful life up until 1952, when he began work on his Joyce biography. In part two, Leader explores in detail topics involved in the book's creation—sleuthing methods, rivals, reviewers—as well as its afterlife (a second edition appeared in 1982, the centenary of Joyce's birth, by which time errors had been unearthed, critiques launched). A coda skims over Ellmann's life until his death, in 1987 (and includes what the publisher's blurb bills as 'a startling secret,' which can be revealed without spoiling a thing: The happily married Ellmann had a late-in-life affair after his wife, Mary, suffered an aneurism and was confined to a wheelchair). What you won't come away with are insights into why Ellmann was so fascinated by Irish writers (he went on to write about Oscar Wilde too), or how the intellectual questions he asked about his subjects might illuminate his own life and scholarly trajectory. Surely Ellmann's Jewishness in the WASP-dominated precincts of elite literary studies, I found myself thinking, played a role in priming his interest in the outsiders he wrote about. Leader doesn't pursue such potential connections. So why bother with a biography of a biographer who spent decades doing what academics usually do: reading, researching, writing, teaching, repeat? If nostalgia was part of the project's attraction for Harvard University Press, that's entirely understandable. Ellmann and his achievement represent a moment in American cultural history when pulling off a book like that was possible: a door stopper with appeal inside the academy and out. When James Joyce appeared, the rigidly narrow siloing of literary fields still lay ahead; for medieval scholars, 18th-century historians, and Romanticists alike, Ellmann's book was an event not to be missed. The biography made Joyce approachable for generations of readers. And if some dove into Ellmann to avoid reading Joyce, others clung to Ellmann for dear life as they navigated the dense pages of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce's wife, Nora, dismissed his last work as nothing but 'chop suey,' but Ellmann uses anecdotes and snippets of Joyce's conversations as well as written passages to make it cohere. Finnegans Wake, in his skillful hands, is a tapestry of all the works Joyce ever wrote, the final and protracted project of a writer who could never stop thinking about Ireland. From the March 1958 issue: The perceptions of James Joyce For Ulysses, too, Ellmann showed how the network of cryptic allusions and the experiments with syntax were part of a bigger plan to capture something true about the intricate crosscurrents of life. He wove together hundreds of biographical stories (some apocryphal) and concise plot summaries so that the critical interpretation was barely noticeable. Ellmann had an 'intelligence of expression,' as his friend Ellsworth Mason noted, that obscured his tendency to lean heavily on the fiction as a source of facts about its author's life. What kept me turning Leader's pages were the glimpses of the academic Atlantis that Ellmann inhabited. Running in the background of this meta-biography is a history of literature as a discipline in America. Ellmann came of age during a period of unprecedented abundance. From 1920 to 1970, the higher-education professoriat grew tenfold, and a new university press was founded every year or so. Thanks to the legendary GI Bill (which, after Ellmann's stint in the Office of Strategic Services during the war, partially paid for his graduate work at Trinity College), undergraduate enrollment exploded, along with federal subsidies for university libraries under the National Defense Education Act. As Ellmann was quietly assembling materials for his biography, specialization was on the rise in American literature departments, as the critic Erich Auerbach warned, auguring the decline of a general humanities education. Literary subfields that had been defined by genre or historical period were giving way to a narrower focus on single authors of much more recent vintage than Shakespeare and Milton. An infrastructure of professionalism—conferences, along with scholarly journals and societies—had begun to emerge. A writer like Joyce, whose works inspired exegetical devotion, was clearly at the forefront of likely 20th-century candidates for academic canonization, and the arrival of Ellmann's biography as the 1950s ended helped spur his elevation to Saint James status in the postwar university. But Ellmann himself was a Joycean avant la lettre. With no 'Joyce industry' yet in place, he had the freedom to shape his subject as he chose. Leaf through the mass of footnotes at the back of James Joyce, and you'll find fewer than 20 books of criticism in the mix. Citations abound of unpublished archival sources—mounds of letters, diaries, telegrams—and exclusive interviews. Size counted for the clout of a pioneering endeavor. At one point, Ellmann had envisioned 'a short book of perhaps 150 pages,' combining biography with reminiscences from Joyce's contemporaries. By 1953, when he signed a contract with Oxford University Press, nervous about the huge $1,500 advance, no competitors were on the horizon, and he had something substantially larger in mind that could serve as an introduction to a barely plumbed subject. From the September 1995 issue: Ulysses in Chinese His ambition paid off, not just in attracting a broad audience, but in advancing his career, at a time when crossover appeal added to academic luster. The accolades poured in for his monumental book, printed on large-format pages with a dark-blue cover and gold lettering on the spine. Ellmann won the National Book Award for biography in 1960, and dream-job offers from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford (where he landed in 1970) soon followed. Like Lionel Trilling before him, Ellmann leaned out of the ivory tower and gained stature within it as departments of literature were specializing. By the early '80s, when the revised edition appeared and he was at work on Wilde, literary studies had already moved in a very different direction. A decade earlier, Theory (with a capital T ) had arrived from France, and soon Lacanians and Freudians; Marxists and feminists; deconstructionists, queer theorists, and postcolonialists had flooded the field. Whereas the focus on single authors had been a boon for a book like James Joyce, the emphasis on Theory proved a bane. The previous approaches to literary works were now suspect, and new questions came to the fore: about their status as commodities in a capitalist system; about the text itself as part of a power struggle and language as an expression of the unconscious. Biography Ellmann-style was left looking hopelessly naive in its effort to understand the work by understanding its writer's life. The author was dead, as Roland Barthes put it, so what was the point of searching for intentionality behind the words on the page? When I entered graduate school in the late '90s, Joyce was a dartboard for every theoretical trend available. Reading him (and most major authors) in a suitably cutting-edge way entailed two steps: picking an available theory and applying it. In Columbia University's English department, where I was and where theoretical allegiances were fierce, I still went ahead and read Ellmann, considering it a guilty pleasure, almost like cozying up with a romance novel. But I shouldn't have felt apologetic, nor should Leader, who feels compelled to explain that Ellmann 'had little time' for theory. Ellmann didn't need to make time for theory. James Joyce has long outlived many of the theoretical interventions that seemed so urgent back then, propelling academic careers even as they deterred nonspecialists from reading Joyce. Ellmann's Joyce is not just a product of its era, but an index of our age. No responsible adviser in a doctoral program in English now would recommend a single-author dissertation if a tenure-track job in the profession is the goal—an ever more daunting one, given the implosion of literature departments, and of so many disciplines across the humanities. In a tighter job market, students aiming to be professors now need to demonstrate range as they pursue a particular problem or literary historical period. The fate of Ellmann and his Joyce biography highlights the disorienting transformation of literature as a field of study. The canons dismantled during the Theory incursion of the 1970s and '80s introduced a more inclusive world of letters, even as the upheaval left English departments fragmented. Harold Bloom, a lightning rod for controversy, responded with The Western Canon in the mid-1990s. In his survey of mostly white, male authors, he argued against the so-called school of resentment, which believes that literature can 'save society' or drive social change and reform. The response was swift, and Bloom became a punching bag for leftist critics, who valued literature's power to deliver social and political messages for the underrepresented. Joyce has made the cut in the 21st century, but just barely. I teach graduate students, most of whom arrive without ever having read a story from Dubliners, let alone tackled Ulysses. Literary historians and critics of various stripes might be willing to acknowledge his value, but in academia, Joyce has long since become one more specialized topic. Those already intimidated by the difficulty are likely to be further put off by the experts' gatekeeping. From the October 2013 issue: Why we're still struggling to make sense of modernism Given how rarely literary scholars and critics these days read outside their field, just imagine the difficulty of reaching a wider nonacademic audience, among whom reading at all is an endangered pastime. A National Endowment for the Arts survey revealed that fewer than half of American adults read more than a single book in 2022. If the data were refined further to rank reading by genre, I'm willing to bet that literary criticism would be close to the bottom. Which makes Ellmann's achievement all the more remarkable. Being able to shape strong sentences, elegantly weave together plot strands, and bring characters to life (even with some inventive fudging)—that may sound like the obvious recipe for any good story. Still, it's no small feat, especially if you add in the pressure to provide interpretive guidance. All the way back in 1938, when he was a Yale senior, Ellmann was convinced that he had to choose between two professions: academic or writer. Thankfully, he managed to be both.
