Bloomsday in Melbourne 2025 Annual Seminar and Lunch

Every year Bloomsday in Melbourne brings to the stage a new production related to the work of James Joyce, in particular his masterpiece Ulysses (1922). In 2025 we are presenting a stage show bringing to life his most outrageous episode of Ulysses, 'Circe.'

Join us for two lively and entertaining presentations bringing Circe to life... and stay for a delicious lunch, with musical entertainment provided by Felix Meagher and Ewen Baker.

The Bloomsday 2025 Seminar

We have two informative papers:

Dr Manuela Hrasky, F.R.A.N.Z.C.P., 'James Joyce And The New Sexology'

As James Joyce was growing up in the late 19th Century, the scientific study of sexuality was being pioneered by thinkers like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. Against the prevailing repressiveness of the Victorian era, these trailblazers explored sexual development and relationships, homosexuality, gender identity, masturbation, fetishism and the ‘perversions’ such as sadism and masochism. We know that Joyce, the committed iconoclast and experimental writer who revealed his sexual precociousness in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was aware of the work of these psychologists, and in the Circe episode of Ulysses he brought to life a catalogue of case studies like theirs through his merciless exposition of the fears and fantasies of his everyman hero, Leopold Bloom. What can we glean from the Circe episode about Joyce and his relationship to this revolution in sexual psychology? Was he a ‘pervert’? A ‘degenerate’? Did he have an unhealthy interest in what Freud called ‘polymorphous perversity’? Or did he embrace it as a way to further his project of writing ‘an epic of the body’? How should history view him? As an idiosyncratic genius – a man out of time – or an emancipator of desire who helped pave the way for sexual liberation, gender fluidity, and body positivity?

Daniel Boyle, 'The End of Monto'

2025 marks the hundredth anniversary of the closure of Monto, Dublin's infamous brothel district that is the setting for Circe's Carnival of Vice. Dan introduces us to the social history of the women who worked there, the often dangerous conditions they worked in, and how Joyce used his own personal knowledge of Dublin's brothels in his 'walk on the wild side.' 

NOTE: Here's where to buy tickets for Circe's Carnival of Vice, 11-22 June at fortyfivedownstairs (just metres from our Seminar and Lunch venue).