The story of UCD's relationship with the development of literary modernism is undoubtedly dominated by James Joyce.
He attended UCD from 1898 to 1902, alongside such leading figures of Irish political and cultural life as Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and Thomas Kettle.
His work, from the "scrupulous meanness" of Dubliners to the endless wordplay and near-universal inclusiveness of Finnegans Wake, have in their aesthetic innovation and linguistic mastery dominated all discussions of Irish literary modernism and overshadowed and haunted the efforts of virtually all Irish writers since.
SKEFFINGTON
Francis Skeffington, suffragist, pacifist and writer, was a friend and schoolmate of James Joyce, Oliver St John Gogarty and Tom Kettle.
KETTLE
Thomas Kettle journalist, barrister, writer, poet and economist, joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913, then on the outbreak of World War I in 1914 enlisted for service in an Irish regiment where in 1916 he met his death on the Western Front.
Probably no writer among those for consideration here was more conscious of Joyce's influence, for good or ill, than Brian O'Nolan aka Flann O'Brien. O'Nolan graduated from UCD in 1932, and received an MA the following year. His works repeatedly draw attention to the processes of their own creation: At Swim-Two-Birds, for example, opens with three suggested beginnings.
This tendency to reflect obsessively on the act of writing itself may have emerged from O'Nolan's often debilitating sense of the inadequacy of all writing after Joyce, however his works, in their spiralling absurdity, uniquely render the conjunction of traditional values and modern innovation that characterised the Ireland of his time in simultaneously hilarious and terrifying detail.
AT SWIM TWO BIRDS
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien's first novel, was published in March 1939. Some four years before its publication, the UCD magazine Comhthrom Féinne reported that the university's “best humorous writer” was “engaged on a novel so ingeniously constructed that the plot is keeping him well in hand.”
Close Me!
Joyce, Nora Barnacle & Carola Giedion-Weckler in Lucerne.
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Joyce, Nora Barnacle & Carola Giedion-Weckler in Lucerne.
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Joyce in Zurich, 1938
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On Sandymount beach (from left): writers John Ryan, Anthony Cronin, Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and unidentified.
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The Third Policeman (1970s cover)
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Not sure
