James Joyce‘s hugely influential short story collection Dubliners was published in 1914, and there are lots of publications / events and even apps to celebrate the centenary.
One very exciting project is Dubliners 100. The new Irish literary publishers Tramp Press (founded by Sarah Davis-Goff* and Lisa Coen) invited a number of respected Irish writers to re-imagine and re-tell the stories from Dubliners; Pat McCabe (The Butcher Boy), Peter Murphy (John the Revelator, Shall We Gather at The River, Donal Ryan The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December), Eimear McBride (A Girl is a Half-formed Thing), John Boyne (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) and Paul Murray (Skippy Dies) are amongst the novelists that have taken on the challenge of adapting Joyce’s famous short stories. (Dubliners 100 will be published on June 05th by Tramp Press).
As part of the above project Peter Murphy takes on the unenviable task of re-imagining The Dead, perhaps the most famous and important of the stories in Dubliners. It’s a story that has been approached in film and on radio, and now in a separate project it’s approached in a multi-media format as a free downloadable app. The project, which was spearheaded by the University College Dublin Humanities Institute, was created by Athena Media and Vermillion Design. As well as the full story, read by the actor Barry McGovern, it features music, rare images of Joyce’s Dublin, architectural drawings and a series of commentaries by the likes of Catriona Crowe, Prof Mary Daly, Prof Anne Fogarty, Prof Gerardine Meaney and Prof Harry White about Joyce, Dubliners, and the Dublin of the time.
Describing the app, Prof Gerardine Meaney said: “This new app shows the clear potential for collaboration between cultural heritage and new technology to create new opportunities for arts, scholarship, media and design in Ireland and globally”.
The James Joyce Centre in Dublin has a series of free lectures throughout the year to celebrate the centenary. Talks include
Full details available here
Joyce is a cornerstone of most English Literature degree courses, so it’s no surprise that there are also a number of Academic events scheduled to celebrate the centenary. For example
The Institute of English Studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London) will mark the centenary of the book’s publication with a symposium at Senate House, Bloomsbury, on Friday 31st October and Saturday 1st November 2014. The Academic Organizer of the symposium is Dr Joseph Brooker (Birkbeck College, University of London).
The James Joyce Summer school in Trieste, organised annually by Prof. John McCourt (University Roma Tre) will have a symposium on Dubliners led by Paul Devine, and will also have a special performance of Declan Gorman’s acclaimed show, The Dubliners Dilemma.
The International James Joyce Symposium will dedicate a part of its academic program to the Dubliners Centenary. The event takes place at the University of Utrecht. From 15th– 20th of June 2014, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, will host “a long the krommerun: the XXIV International James Joyce Symposium.” The hosting committee made up of Onno Kosters, David Pascoe, Peter de Voogd, and Tim Conley in their call for papers specifically requested papers on Dubliners 100, so expect a lively discussion on Dubliners there.
*Davis-Goff is, famously, the intern who spotted, in a slushpile, the potential of Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart.