James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born 143 years ago this Sunday on 2 February 1882 and died on 13 January 1941. He was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic and a leader of the modernist avant-garde movement.
Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.
The World of James Joyce: His Life and Work is an authoritative documentary made in 1986 and it does what it say on the tin – gives a non-nonsense portrait of one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th Century.
Not bundle of laughs but very informative, the film was produced by Ireland’s National Television and shot in Joyce’s environments in Dublin, Trieste, Zurich, Rome, London, and Paris. It draws on the reminiscences of numerous associates, friends, and relatives, and shows the role in Joyce’s development of such figures as Harriet Weaver and Sylvia Beach.
When he couldn’t find a publisher for his masterwork, Ulysses, which had taken him seven years to write, the young Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare & Company, a bookshop in Paris, despite having no publishing experience, published it out of friendship on, as Joyce insisted, his 40th birthday, February 2, 1922.
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