James Joyce

UCD Adult Education Centre are offering a ten week course to tie in with Dublin: One City, One Book. Students will also read the books previously chosen for the Dublin: One City, One Book festival: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light. The focus of the course will be to situate these books as Dublin books, showing different aspects and histories of the city. The course will consider the changing place of Dublin in literature and examine different ways the city has been represented by writers. The course will build up to a sustained consideration of the Dublin: One City, One Book choice for 2012 making full use of events staged by Dublin City Libraries.

JOYCED! by renowned Irish writer Donal O'Kelly takes us on a tour de force of Joycean Dublin, catapulting the audience through the crucial year in Joyce's life of 1904.

JOYCED! by Donal O'Kelly, is performed by Katie O'Kelly, directed by Sorcha Fox and produced by Breda Cashe.

A Whirlwind Love Affair, Gunfire, Music, Rejection, Flight, Boater Hats... James Joyce like you've never seen him before.

The show looks back on Joycean Dublin in 1904 through the eyes of JoJo, a stallholder in Dublin's Rathmines Market, with a dangerous obsession for all things Joycean. JoJo careers like a person possessed through the full gamut of 1904 James Joyce:-

• his battles with his mad dad
• his bronze medal win for singing in the Feis competition
• a crazed night of gunfire in the Sandycove Tower
• his rescue from Monto mayhem by the man who became Bloom
• and his passion for Nora Barnacle and their fabled walk on 16th June

It is a chaotic, exciting, whirlwind odyssey through the people, events and year that would later be famously recreated in Joyce's work.

Joyce's Dubliners stands out as one of the most accomplished literary portrayals of city life ever written. It has entranced readers and fired the imaginations of artists and writers for nearly a hundred years. As a contribution to the One City One Book celebrations, and using Dubliners as inspiration, teenagers from the Coolock and Darndale area will work with the poet Dave Lordan to give us their own imaginative portraits of contemporary Dublin. This will be the Coolock/Darndale contribution to the larger Telling our Stories/Telling Ourselves project, a Creative Literacy project being undertaken by Dave Lordan in his role as Poetry Consultant for the MA in Poetry Studies at the Mater Dei Institute, a college of Dublin City University. The result will be a living tribute to the infinite creativity of our city, its artists and its people through past and present times.

Watch out for more on this over the coming months...

Today, Thursday, 2nd February, is the 130th anniversary of the birth of James Joyce!

Arguably Ireland’s greatest literary genius and a leading proponent of modernism in fiction, James Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray, and spent his earliest years there and in Castlewood Avenue. He was educated at Clongowes Wood College and at Belvedere College before going on to University College Dublin (on St Stephen’s Green), where he studied modern languages.

Joyce left Ireland with Nora Barnacle in 1904, and was to spend the rest of his life in Italy and France, paying his last visit to Ireland in 1912. Joyce died in Zurich on the 13th January, 1941, and is buried in Zurich's Fluntern Cemetery. 

Joyce's collection of short stories, Dubliners, and the choice for Dublin: One City, One Book 2012, was first published in 1914 by Grant Richards Ltd., London.

Right: James Joyce. Image of Joyce reproduced from the original glass negative held in UCD Library Special Collections by kind permission of Helen Solterer.

Dublin City Council is delighted to announce that the 'Dublin: One City, One Book' choice for April 2012 is Dubliners by James Joyce. The chosen title will be supported by a wide range of public events and celebrations next April.

Right: Click image to view larger version.

Previous One City, One Book novels have been Flann O’Briens’s At Swim Two Birds, Sebastian Barry’s A Long, Long Way, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor.