2. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born
on 2 February 1882 in the Dublin suburb of
Rathgar. At the age of 9 James wrote a poem
on the death of Charles Parnell. When his
father lost his job,the family started to slip
into poverty which resulted in James being
home schooled. Luckily it was short termed
and James started attending Jesuits' Dublin
school, Belvedere College, in 1893.
3. Joyce enrolled in University College
Dublin in 1898,studying English,
French and Italian. He also became
active in theatrical and literary
circles in the city. In 1904 he met
his future wife,Nora Barnacle. Later
on he started teaching English in
Trieste and for a short time in Pola.
5. Joyce returned to Ireland briefly in 1909
in a futile attempt to start a chain of
motion picture theaters in Dublin, and
again in 1912 in an unsuccessful attempt
to arrange for the publication of the
short story collection Dubliners, which
had to be abandoned due to fears of
prosecution for obscenity and libel.
Although the plates were
destroyed, Dubliners was finally
published in England in 1914. A short
volume of poetry, Chamber Music, was
his first published volume; it appeared
in 1907. He published two subsequent
volumes of poetry, Pomes
Pennyeach (1927) and Collected
Poems (1937).
6. Joyce and his family spent the
years of World War I in Zürich,
where he finished his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. It first appeared in The Egoist, a
periodical edited by Harriet Shaw Weaver, and was
published in book form in 1916. In 1917, Joyce
contracted glaucoma; for the rest of his life he would
endure pain, periods of near blindness, and many
operations. At this time he also wrote his only play,
the Ibsenesque Exiles (1918).
7. Ulysses, written between 1914 and
1921, was published in parts
in The Little Review and The
Egoist, but Joyce encountered the
same opposition to publishing
the novel in book form that he
had confronted with Dubliners. It
was published in Paris in 1922 by
Shakespeare & Company, a
bookstore owned by Sylvia
Beach, an American expatriate.
Its publication was banned in the
United States until 1933. For
many years he lived mainly on
money donated by patrons,
notably Harriet Shaw Weaver.
8. From 1922 until 1939 Joyce worked
on Finnegans Wake (1939), a
complex novel that attempts to
connect multiple cycles of Irish
and human history into the
framework of a single night's
events in the family of a Dublin
publican. In 1931 Joyce finally
married Nora. Her practical,
sometimes cynical response to
Joyce's work provided a needed
complement to his own self-
absorption. Joyce and Nora had
a turbulent relationship; both
were profoundly affected by the
progressive insanity of their
daughter. Joyce died in Zürich
in 1941 after an operation for a
perforated duodenal ulcer.
11. In a collection of short stories
Joyce writes about a group of
Dublin residents, each of
whom reflects the moral and
political paralysis of the city.
The story are characterized by
key symbolic moments, which
Joyce termed epiphanies*,
which allow each of the
protagonists to experience a
deep level of self-awareness.
Epiphany’ has become the
standard literary term to
refer to the sudden
revelation or self-realization
which frequently occurs in
modern poetry or fiction]
12. On the Irish and their language – “The Irish, doomed to express
themselves in a language not their own, had stamped it with their
genius and competed for glory with other civilized countries. It was
called English literature. Samuel Beckett many years later
improved on that claiming that the Catholic church and English
domination had buggered [Irish writers] into glory’”.
On Dublin – “not merely a
backdrop for their veniality
but as rich a musical as
themselves. No other writer
so effulgently and so
ravenously recreated a
city.”
“Dublin was his inner
landscape”.
13. This book gave Joyce international
fame. The time span of this long and
complex novel is that of a single day,
16th June 1904, the day Joyce met
Nora Barnacle, who was to become
his lifelong companion.
It has no traditional plot. One key to its
interpretation is given by its main
structure: 18 chapters whose titles
are derived from the Odyssey by
Homer, as Joyce based Leopold
Bloom’s wanderings in Dublin on the
Wanderings of those of the mythical
Odysseus.
Leopold is a modern Ulysses, a
common Everyman living in Dublin,
a city where cultural and artistic life
– in Joyce’s opinion – is paralysed.
His travelling is compressed into a
single day in a modern town1. His
adventures are the events of
everyday life.
14. “To each chapter he gave a title, a
scene, an organ, an art, a colour, a
symbol and a technique; so that we
are in a tower, school, strand, house,
bath, graveyard, newspaper, office,
tavern, library, street, concert room,
second tavern, a lying-in hospital, a
brothel, a house and a big bed. The
organs include kidneys, genitals, heart
brain, ear, eye, nose, womb, nerves,
flesh, and skeleton. The symbols vary
from horse to tide, to nymph, to
Eucharist, to siren, to Virgin, to
Fenian, to whore, to heart mother. The
technique ranges from narcissistic to
gigantic, from tumescent to
hallucinatory, and the styles so
variable that the 18 episodes could
really be described as eighteen novels
between the one cover.”
15. Joyce represents
both the interior and
exterior worlds of his
characters. The
realistic descriptions
of the external events
are mixed with
historical, literary,
religious, and
geographical
allusions, while
interior monologue is
used to recreate the
characters’ most
intimate and random
thoughts.
Word, play, puns,
and gross jokes are
mixed with highly
intellectual verbal
exchanges. The
triviality of
everyday life is
sometimes
described in
minute detail,
while elsewhere
there are intensely
poetic passages
and a variety of
styles that range
from the literary to
the journalistic.
Language of Ulysses
“Language is the
hero and the
heroine , language
in constant fusion
with a dazzling
virtuosity. All the
given notion about
story, character,
plot, and human
polarizings are
capsized
16. Joyce believed in the impersonality of
the author. The formal aspect of fiction
was very important for him, as well as
the problem of the point of view. In order
to ensure that his works carried no
‘messages’ from himself, he adopted
different points of view, different
narrative techniques, different linguistic
styles, appropriate or paradoxical to
different characters or situations. In this
way he hoped to solve the problem of how
to present the fragmented, multifaceted
nature of reality and how to convey the
subjective dimension of experience.
It was Joyce’s opinion that the artist’s task was neither to teach
nor to convince, but to make people aware of reality through
their own subjective perception. Therefore he sought a form which
would make a literary work as ‘impersonal’ as possible.
17. “What he wanted to do was to wrest the secret from life
and that could only be done through language because,
as he said, the history of people is the history of
