Introducing James Joyce

1882-1941
three eras: Victorian, Early
Modern, Late Modern
Irish Catholic ~ High
Modernist ~ European Exile

Irish Catholic

An oppressed people (British colony)

Agitation of late 1800s
Parnell and Home Rule
Betrayal and disappointment

Early Years

Born into new Catholic middle class

Familys decline
Jesuit education
Education in the City of Dublin
Vocation: from Priest to Poet

Love and Exile

Experiences Paris (1902-03)

Death of Mother (1903)
Meets Nora Barnacle (June 1904)
Leaves Ireland (October 1904)
The Continent: Trieste, Rome,
Zurich, Paris

Dubliners (1914)

15 stories, written 1903-4 (12), 1906 (2)

and 1907 (The Dead)
My intention was to write a chapter of the
moral history of my country and I chose
Dublin for the scene because that city
seemed to me the center of paralysis.
I always write about Dublin, because if I
can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to
the heart of all the cities of the world. In
the particular is contained the universal.

Joyce on Dubliners

I have tried to present it to the indifferent

public under four of its aspects: childhood,
adolescence, maturity and public life. The
stories are arranged in this order.
I have written it for the most part in a
style of scrupulous meanness.
Whats the matter with you is that youre
afraid to live. You and people like you. This
city is suffering from hemiplegia [paralysis]
of the will.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

(1916)

Highly autobiographical (but beware!)

A declaration of artistic independence
Highly modernist: stream-of-consciousness,
confluence of naturalism and symbolism
Long composition: essay (A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man ~ 1904), early novel
(Stephen Hero ~ 1904-06), finished novel
(1907-08, 1914)

Importance of A Portrait

THE Modernist bildungsroman (novel of

education) and kunstlerroman (novel of
the making of an artist)
Liberating style and themes
The anguish and exhilaration of gaining
power over language
Develops through style as much as
through plot

Joyce and Modernism

The Experience of World War I (1914-1918)

Pounds dictum: Make it new
The Great Questioners: Marx, Nietzsche,
Darwin, Freud
An era of Revolution
Fragmentation
Order: myth, art

Ulysses (1922)

The great modernist epic

Mythic method: the past and the present
Extends Joyces experiments with style to
the extreme: style becomes the plot
With me, the thought is always simple
I have discovered that I can do anything
with language I want

Finnegans Wake (1939)

Composed from 1922 to 1939

Work in Progress (only Nora knew the
title)
An unclassifiable work: Dream?
Scripture? Joke? Philosophy of
language? Myth?
The Dream of Everyman and
Everywoman, in Everylanguage

Death of Joyce

A war refugee: fled Paris, arrived in

Switzerland
Illness of daughter Lucia
Despondent over reception of Finnegans
Wake
Died on 13 January, 1941, 3 weeks after
reaching Switzerland