James Joyce

• Life:  

  • 1882: Born in Dublin in a middle-class catholic family  
  • Educated by JESUITS  
  • 1899: studied modern languages  
  • Contemporary to Yeats but didn’t agree on their spirit of rediscovering irish society  
  • He felt more european  
  • 1902: bachelor degree 
  • 1903: leaves ireland  
  • Has to get back for his mother’s illiness -> meets nora 
  • 1905: settles in Trieste; meets Svevo 
  • Has Giorgio and Lucia  
  • 1915: moves to Zurich  
• Literary production:  

  • 1914: eve of the WW1 -> THE DUBLINERS 
  • 1916: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN  
  • 1917: anonymous donations  
  • 1922: publishes ULYSSES (serial form on “The little review” 
  • 1939: FINNEGANS WAKE  
  • 1941: death of the age of 59 
• Joyce as a novelist:  

  Of the greatest representatives of modernism  

   

  Setting: Ireland -> Dublin 

  Described as the place of paralysis  

  He makes use of different perspectives/points of view simultaneously  

   

  The isolation and detachment of the artist from society is conceived through:  

  • Greater importance given to the inner world of the characters 
  • Time perceived as subjective 
  • Task to render life objectively 

   

  AIM: give life to this sense of ISOLATION and ALIENATION  

   
• Joyces’ style  

   

  Dubliners:  

  • Realism 
  • Disciplined prose 
  • Different points of view 
  • Free-direct speech 

   

  A portrait of the artist of a young man:  

  • Third-person narration 
  • minimal dialogue 
  • language and prose used to portray the protagonist’s state of mind 
  • free-direct speech 

  Ulysses: 

  • Interior monologue 
  • two levels of narration 
  • extreme interior monologue 

   
• DUBLINERS (1914) 

  • Published in “The Irish Homestead” under the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus 
  • described as afflicted people 
  • set in Dublin: “The city seemed to me the centre of paralysis” 
  • Portray of the lives of ordinary people  

  Stories divided in four groups:  

  -> four stages of life  

  1. Childhood  
  2. Adolescence  
  3. Mature life  
  4. Public life  

  Recurrent theme in all: feeling of paralysis -> result of being tied to a narrow cultural, social and political traditions 
• Style: 

  • Each story opens in medias res  
  • Stories told by the character's perspective 
  • language suits the age, the social class and the role of the characters  

  
  

  • Use of free indirect speech and free direct speech -> direct presentation of the character’s thoughts 
  • Detailed and concise descriptions 
  • Realism mixed with symbolism that gives deeper meaning of external details 

  
  

  • EPIPHANY:  

  It is the special moment in which a trivial (= banal) gesture, an external object or a banal situation or an episode lead the character to a sudden self-realization about himself or about reality
• Themes:  

  Main theme: PARALYSIS  

  Is of two types:  

  1. Physical paralysis  
  2. Moral paralysis  

   

  1. Caused by external forces 
  2. Linked to religion, politics and culture 

   

   

  Alternative to the paralysis:  

  Escape plan that always leads to failure  

   

  Climax:  

  Awarness of the paralysis  

   

  Absence of a didactic and moral aim:  

  Because of the impersonality of the artist: suspends any moral judgement