All about the Irish novelist James Joyce

1. James Joyce
1882 - 1941

2. Introduction:
- During the 19th century, England gave somewhat an uncertain approval to
the abilities of contemporary foreign writers.
- But today when modern literature is spoken of, the term is naturally
understood to refer to literary works in several languages, and implies that
great works in any one of these languages have been built upon an
awareness and appreciation of literature in other tongues.
- James Joyce, whose work is at one intensely local and universal, is an
example of this interdependence.
- He attributed his most famous innovation in fictional method to a
Frenchman, Edouard Dujardin.
- He ransacked the world’s languages and literatures for his own purposes,
yet he never wrote anything of consequence that did not deal with his native
Dublin and his life there.

3. About the Writer:
- James Joyce was an Irish novelist, who is considered to be one of the
most influential writers in the modernist avant-grade of the early 20th
century.
- He was a linguist who for many years earned his living by teaching English
for foreigners.
- His father, John Joyce, did not provide a stable household, so his mother
tried to hold their large family together, however, after her death, Joyce left
Dublin for good, with Nora Barnacle who was to become his wife.
- He is known for 6 works:
a book of poems, a play, and 4 works of fiction, which are: Dubliners, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.

4. - Joyce came to manhood in an Ireland full of the stirrings of the Irish
Renaissance whose most notable figures were: W.B. Yeats, George
Moore, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge.
- He was extremely against the Gaelic revival that Ireland was trying to
achieve during the Irish Renaissance, believing this movement would
separate Ireland from the mainstream of European culture.
- He thought it was superficial and preferred to tell the bitter truth
about Dublin, so he planned his work Dubliners very carefully to reflect
the grim reality of Irish life.
- World War I forced him to move from Trieste to Switzerland, where
he remained until he was able to move to Paris in 1920, and he lived
there through the triumphant period of the publication of Ulysses.
- Driven again to Switzerland by the Nazi occupation of France, he died
in 1941, nearly blind and almost worn out by a combination of hard
work and hard living.

5. Dubliners:
- Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories, including “Araby”.
- It was written in a style of scrupulous meanness, but this does not apply
to certain passages in Araby.
- Each word and phrase has a precise function, incident and plot are
minimized, the author does not seem to be manipulating characters and
emotions, and form and theme are intimately connected.
- Lyricism not only springs out of the promise that youth offers us all, but
out of a strong sense of the power of art to shape a world no matter how
wretched and shabby it may be.
- This power enable Joyce ultimately to triumph over the meanness that
betrays itself in the impoverished emotions and the cadences of speech
which are so faithfully recorded in Dubliners.

6. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
- Joyce’s first novel, it is directly autobiographical, its hero, Stephen
Dedalus, is a young man who renounces his family and country and
aims to be an artist who uses his individual voice to create a voice
and conscience for the community he was born in.
- This hero is named after Daedalus, the Greek inventor who
designed the labyrinth of Crete, and was imprisoned to protect its
secret, then he made wings to escape.
- Stephen similarly escapes from Ireland and takes flight, only to
penetrate the labyrinth of Irish consciousness from afar, and to
judge all he was known.

7. Ulysses:
- “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist” do not present the difficulties of
Ulysses, Joyce’s second novel, a work that reflects the consciousness of its
characters in a literal sense: that is, the book is composed of the characters’
internal monologues.
- This literal device, often referred to as a “stream of consciousness”.
- Ulysses is told chiefly through the consciousness of its principal figure,
Leopold Bloom.
- Bloom’s consciousness is made to embrace not only the numerous details
of the life of the city of Dublin on just one day, but the whole journey of
human beings from birth to grave.
- In this novel, Joyce attempts to embody the significance of all human
history, the meaning of family, of manhood and womanhood, war, politics,
and human achievements of every sort, but above all, the achievements of
those artists who have found in words the means of binding people
together.

8. Finnegans Wake:
- In this novel, Joyce is no longer content with exciting words; he takes apart,
combines, and rebuilds words into a pattern of meanings that no single
language alone affords.
- Joyce knew Latin, Italian, French, German, and numerous other tongues,
and in this final work he drew upon all his knowledge.
- “Wake’ is not only the Irish term for funeral, but a part of the verb “to
awaken”, thus the novel is concerned with the death and rebirth of Finnegan,
builder of cities and a Dublin bricklayer, a compound of all the heroes of
myth.
- Full of riddles, allusions, and ambiguities, it is a tremendous performance, a
book about everything.

9. Questions:
- Why was Joyce against the Gaelic revival?
- What are the names of Joyce’s three novels?