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Emeritus Professor and Former Chair Lectures on "Iconic and Filmic Joyce"
In the Third Annual English Department Emerti Lecture, Professor Morris Beja gave a multimedia presentation that concentrated on James Joyce's role in popular culture, specifically film. The plethora of Joyce allusions found in modern and contemporary film is indicative of Joyce's iconic status or, as Professor Beja put it, his status as "the single most prestigious writer of all in Modern Western literature." Joyce appears in a variety of ways in films ranging from Carol Reed's The Third Man to Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School.
In her introduction for Dr. Morris Beja at the Third Annual Emeriti Lecture, English Department chair Valerie Lee described the former chair as a "scholar's scholar, a professor's professor, and a chair's chair" who still teaches film classes in the Department. Lee knows of Professor Beja's reputation not only as a colleague, but as a student. She took one of his graduate classes while a Ph.D. student at Ohio State, and remembers: "We read some of the best literature there is. And I remember sitting in seminar thinking, ‘I want to teach a seminar as well as [Professor Beja].' "
Professor Beja's multimedia presentation concentrated on James Joyce's role in popular culture, specifically film. The plethora of Joyce allusions found in modern and contemporary film is indicative of Joyce's iconic status or, as Professor Beja put it, his status as "the single most prestigious writer of all in Modern Western literature." Joyce appears in a variety of ways in films ranging from Carol Reed's The Third Man to Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School.
Professor Beja also touched briefly on Joyce's influence on popular music, television, drama, and modern and contemporary writing, and even showed a picture of the James Joyce credit card available in Ireland. All this influence results in much scholarship, as Professor Beja related. Joyce is "second only to Shakespeare in the number of studies published."
Professor Beja, who earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University, is the author of Epiphany in the Modern Novel; Film and Literature; Joyce, the Artist Manqué, and Indeterminacy: Two Essays; and James Joyce: A Literary Life, and essays on twentieth-century British, Irish, and American fiction, and on film; editor of a scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf's Mrs.Dalloway, and of the James Joyce Newsletter, and books on Orson Welles, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and psychological fiction. He served as visiting professor at University of Thessaloniki, Greece; University College, Dublin, Ireland; Northwestern University; Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. Professor Beja is a recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and of the University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.
