JAMES JOYCE

(1890-1980)

BACKGROUND

  • James (Augustine Aloysius) Joyce
  • Born in Dublin, Ireland
  • Father:
    • John Stanislaus Joyce
    • domineering
    • from a respectable family (in Cork)
    • but his own family was sliding
      • (JJ in poverty throughout)
    • lazy, wasteful, improvident (middle-class facade)
      • drinking, spending
    • failure (distillery business)
    • odd jobs (politics & tax collecting)
    • Irish patriot
  • Mother:
    • Mary Jane Murray
    • 10 years younger than his father
    • skilled pianist
    • devout Roman Catholic
    • dominated by her husband
  • education:
    • Jesuit boarding school (Clongowes School)
    • Belvedere College, Dublin
  • early literary Influences (at college)
    • W.B. Yeats
    • Henrik Ibsen
    • St. Thomas Aquinas
  • always in poverty
  • attitudes @ religion, marriage, “home”:
    • in a letter to his future wife, Nora, in 1904 –
    • “My mind quite rejects the whole present social order and Christianity--home, the recognized virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines. How could I like the idea of home? My home was simply a middle-class affair ruined by spendthrift habits which I have inherited.”

 BACKGROUND

  • 1902:
    • writing lyric poetry
    • graduated from college
    • moved to Paris for 1 year
      • teacher, journalist
    • returns from Paris b/c mother = dying
  • 1904:
    • leaves Dublin after mother’s death
    • travels (w/future wife)
  • Trieste:
    • Dubliners, short stories (1914)
      • “Araby”
      • “Eveline”
      • “The Dead”
    • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (p. 1916)
    • Exiles, play (1918)
    • Most of Ulysses (p.1922/33)
      • banned for obscenity in several countries (UK, USA)
    • Chamber Music, book of poetry (1907)
    • Finnegan’s Wake (1939)
    • jobs =
      • teacher, tweed salesman, journalist, lecturer
      • (always poor)
  • Zurich, Switzerland
    • moves there during WORLD WARS I and II
    • dies there in January of 1941
    • stomach ulcers
    • 58
  • eyesight
    • continuously worsening

THEMES

  • human existence = fragmentary

    • reflected in his Style

  • human existence = subjective

    • reflected in his Style

  • life = a journey

    • reflected in his Plots

    • (Ulysses)

  • waning Irish patriotism

  • waning Roman Catholicism

  • the relationship between the modern man & his myth and history

THEMES

  • focusing on contemporary questions

    • of Irish political and cultural independence

    • the effects of organized religion on the soul

    • the cultural and moral decay produced economic development and heightened urbanization

  • the Irish, Dubliners

    • living in a paralysis

    • living in hopeless situations they may not fully understand

    • hopelessness, inevitability, (social) determinism

STYLE

EARLY =

  • plain, traditional, commonplace
  • easy to read/understand
  • simplicity
  • REALISM
    • sense detail/description
    • psychology
    • almost regional (Dubliners)
  • NATURALISM
    • detachment
  • balance btw. realism & naturalism:
    • realistically described, from their perspective
      • which gives us insight into their states of mind
      • allows us to appreciate their feelings, hopelessness/desolation
    • at the same time, the narrative distance
      • allows us to see clearly their flaws, weaknesses, errors
      • to see the irony of situations
  • lack of conclusions, open-ended, lack of moralizing
  • character =
    • place, possessions
  • while in 3rd person, relates through character’s perspective
    • omniscience
    • as if reading thoughts
  • DESCRIPTION
    • characterization
    • evokes empathy from readers
    • readers understand story from character’s perspective
    • realism, places the reader there; evocative
  • SENSE of HUMANITY
    • characters = real people
    • feel for them
    • not nihilistic or hateful or condescending
    • evokes an empathy for the Irish, Dubliners
      • living in a paralysis
      • living in hopeless situations they may not fully understand
      • hopelessness, inevitability, (social) determinism
         

STYLE

LATER =

  • EXPERIMENTAL
  • experimental use of language
  • character’s state of mind –
    • interior monologue
    • omission of punctuation, quotation marks
    • stream-of-consciousness
    • Freudian
    • multiple literary styles in same work
      • to reflect the character, the character’s state of mind
  • lack of “plot”
  • “evolving form”
    • changing/alternating POV, styles
    • maturation
    • relapses, misperceptions, misunderstandings
    • (epiphanies & anti-epiphanies)
  • alternating POV
  • epiphanies (& “anti-epiphanies”), maturation process

 

* SUBJECTIVITY & early 20th-CENTURY WRITERS

  • subjectivity of human existence
    • we live in private worlds
    • task of writer =
      • to illuminate these inner worlds
      • to illuminate the individual experience
  • SIGMUND FREUD *
  • James Joyce: Ulysses one day (6/16/04) in the life of Leopold Bloom, both microscopic, Irish, internal AND microscopic, mythic, universal
  • Virginia Woolf: "stream of consciousness" of her characters' inner thoughts, feelings; non-linear chronology
  • DH Lawrence: although more conventional in style, still internal inner lives of his characters; battle & mutual dependence of the sexes; destruction of nature by industrialization
     

"EVELINE"

SONGS

"EVELINE"

SONGS

 

LINKS LINKS