James Joyce was an Irish novelist born in 1882 who is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Some of his most famous works include Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. Ulysses, published in 1922, depicts the wanderings of Leopold Bloom through Dublin in a single day and is influenced structurally by Homer's Odyssey. Joyce is noted for using experimental literary techniques like stream-of-consciousness and interior monologue to provide subjective perspectives on ordinary life and events in Dublin. He lived in exile for much of his life due to criticism of his works' depiction of sexuality and the Catholic Church.

1. 1882-1941

2. Life and works:

 James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and studied at the
University College of Dublin. He grew up as a rebel
between rebels, whose purpose was freeing Ireland from
the English.
 He saw himself as a European man
 In June 1904, he fell in love with Nora Barnacle; their first
date (on 16th June) will become the ‘Bloomsday’ of
Ulysses.
 In Triest, he began teaching English to Italo Svevo.
 He had some financial problems, when he was in Trieste

3. Life and Works:

 In 1907, he published ‘Chamber Music’: a collection of 36
poems.
 In1914, he published ‘Dubliners’: a collection of short
stories about Dublin's life.
 The poet Ezra Pound helped Joyce to print: ‘A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man’ (1916), which is a semi-autobiographical
novel.
 In 1922, he published in Paris ‘Ulysses’ but he received
some critics about the sexual content present in the story.
 He died in Switzerland in 1941.

4. Ordinary Dublin:

 At the age of 22 he went into a voluntary exile.
 He set all his works in Dublin or Ireland, representing
a realistic portrait of the life of the people doing
ordinary things.
 Portraying these ordinary people, he could represent
people’s mentality fusing it with the reality of the
world.

5. The rebellion against the
Church:

 Joyce was educated by the Jesuits, but he
challenged Catholicism. He criticized the fact that the
Church had taken possession of the way the Irish
thought.
 He was almost blind but he had developed his
hearing skills, so to him the words used became very
important.

6. A subjective perception of time:

 Joyce was a modernist writer.
 In his works, the facts become confused and were
studied from a different point of view simultaneously,
in fact they are presented as clues and not
with the use of an omniscient narrator.
 Joyce's story opens with medias res and the analysis
of a particular moment, and the portrait of the
character is based on introspection; accordingly this
introspection is subjective and follows the characters’
psychological change.

7. The impersonality of the artist:

 Influenced by French authors Joyce believed in the
impersonality of the artist.
 The artist has to give the readers a realistic image of
life, so there is an author's isolation from the society.
Of course in the work, the point of view of the author
isn't present: so often he uses free direct speech, the
epiphany and the interior monologue to describe the
feelings of the characters.

8. 1914

9. Dubliners:

 Dubliners is a psychological realistic picture of lower
middle class people of the time oppressed by Religion,
Politics and Cultural and Economic forces.
 It consists of fifteen short stories.
 The stories are arranged into four groups: Childhood,
Adolescence, Mature Life and Public Life.
 The opening stories deal with childhood and youth in
Dublin the others, advancing in time and expanding in
scope, concern the middle years of characters and their
social and political affairs.

10. Dubliners:

 He chose Dublin for the scene because that city
seemed to Joyce the center of paralysis and his
intention was to write a chapter of the moral history
of his country
 The Dead could be considered Joyce’s first
masterpiece; it’s at once the summary and climax of
Dubliners
 The same themes, symbols, narrative techniques and
a particular structure are the common points in all
the stories.

11. The use of epiphany:

 The description is realistic, it has an abundance of
external details.
 The use of realism is mixed with symbolism
 He wanted to take the reader beyond the usual
aspects of life, using the ‘epiphany’ that is ‘the
sudden spiritual manifestation’ caused by a trivial
gesture or a banal situation, which is used to lead the
character to a sudden self-realization about
himself/herself.

12. A pervasive theme: paralysis

 The paralysis of Dublin is both physical and moral.
 The Dubliners aren’t aware of it or because they lack
of courage to break the chains that bind them.
 They are weak and scared people.
 The main theme is the failure to find a way out of
the paralysis, the opposite of it is the ‘escape’ and its
consequent failure.
 Every character experiences a sense of enclosure that
causes the failure.

13. Narrative technique:

 The stories are told from the perspective of a
character.
 He used free direct speech or free direct thoughts; in
this way the reader can acquire direct knowledge of
the characters.
 The linguistic register is varied. It suits the age, the
social class and the role of the characters.

14. 1922

15. Ulysses:

 The time setting is on 16th June 1904, which was an
important day because Nora Barnacle, James’ future
wife, made her fondness clear to him.
 The place setting is Dublin.
 The protagonists of the story are: Leopold Bloom,
Stephen Dedalus and Molly (Bloom’s wife).
 This novel sums up the themes and techniques that
Joyce had developed in his previous works.

16. The plot:

 The story deals with the events of a day. The
protagonist, Bloom, leaves his home at eight
o’clock to buy his breakfast and comes back at two of
the following morning. Leopold wanders into many
streets and in a brothel he meets Stephen (the
protagonist of “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young
Man”) who became his adopted son. The novel ends
with Molly who is planning an afternoon of
adultery with her music director.

17. Ulysses & Odyssey:

 Joyce inspired his novel on Homer’s epic novel, in fact he used
this famous tale as a structural framework for his book and
arranged his characters on the heroic model.
 Bloom, a common man, represents Ulysses.
 Stephen is Telemachus.
 Molly represents Penelope but unlike her she is unfaith.
 Ulysses can be divided into three parts and eighteen episodes:
Chapters 1 to 3 : Telemachiad;
Chapters 4 to 15 :Odyssey;
Chapters 16 to 18: Nostos ;
Each chapter is organized around a different hour, a colour, an
organ of the body, a sense or a symbol.

18. The setting:

 Joyce wanted to give a description of ordinary life so
he placed the characters in house, pubs and streets
that he had frequented.
 Each movement of the characters is planned.
 Through his novel Joyce managed to make the real
air of Dublin with his atmosphere. Consequently,
Dublin becomes itself a character of the story.

19. The representation of human
nature:

 Stephen Dedalus, Mr. and Mrs. Bloom are the symbols of
two aspects of human nature: Stephen is the prototype of
a man in search of maturity (in his stream of
consciousness he associates things by resemblance); Mrs.
Bloom identifies herself with her sensual nature and
fecundity because she stands for flesh. Her thoughts are
driven by memories; Mr. Bloom is everybody (he
represents the human variety), in his stream of
consciousness things are linked through a relation of
cause-effect ore space and time.
 The theme of the novel is moral: human life means
suffering but it’s also a instrument to reach good.

20. The mythical method:

 Ulysses is written through ‘the mythical method’. It
can be compared to the Homer’s ‘Odyssey’; they
present some differences: Joyce used Homer’s myth
to describe a Dublin day. He called his work ‘novel’
because he wanted to write a ‘modern epic in prose’

21. A revolutionary prose:

 Joyce used several methods to present various matters.
He created the ‘collage technique’, combining: the stream
of consciousness technique, the cinematic technique,
flashbacks, tracking shots, suspension of speech, question
and answer, dramatic dialogue and the juxtaposition of
events. This technique is similar of cubist artists’ one.
Joyce perfected the internal monologue through the levels
of narration, one external to the character’s mind and the
other internal.
 The language is characterized by puns, images,
paradoxes, interruptions (he used also foreign words and
allusions to other texts.