James joyce

James  JOYCE

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, and having an extraordinary academic ability he went to Paris to study medicine. But he changed his mind and he started writing poems and prose. Then he met Nora Barnacle and he moved with her first to Pola and and to Trieste. Joyce became English teacher and he first published a collection of poetry. In 1914 he published Dubliners. During WWI, he moved to Switzerland with his family and wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his first autobiographical novel, in 1916, and later in 1918 he wrote Exiles which was declared obscene and banned in Britain and in America but it was published in Paris. During this period he always wrote Ulysses, his masterpiece. Finnegans Wake was the novel in which he truly developed his own polylinguistic vocabulary and got far away from rules.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - both indirect and direct interior monologue. The writer almost disappears and the readers find themselves directly inside a character's mind.

EPIPHANY: climax of intensity in the narration. It is a sudden revelation in which the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant. It is a moment in which a sudden spiritual awareness awakening is experienced, when ordinary thoughts and feelings come together to produce a sudden awareness.

The Dead - it begins during an after-Christmas dinner at the house of two unmarried sisters who are also aunts of the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy. He goes to the party with his wife Gretta and the house becomes the best representation of Ireland and its tradition in which every guest represents a different generation, religious belief and political tendencies. Gabriel gives a speech and he feels good, then while he is on his way to the hotel he thinks of the best moments of his marriage and still feels love and desire for Gretta. At the same time she is crying because a song she heard at the party made her thinking of her first love Michael Furey who she thinks killed himself for her. She stops and time seems to stop too. So, she has her Epiphany, while Gabriel is watching her from down the steps. She tells her husband the story. In that moment, while Gretta is finally sleeping, Gabriel had his Epiphany looking outside at the show that is covering everything and he thins of the insignificance of even the most intense moments of existence which face like all the rest into oblivion.

The story can be considered realistic and at the same time symbolic. Joyce gives us a picture of the character's inner thoughts and feelings, using the indirect interior monologue.

Ulysses - Joyce's masterpiece. Published in 1922, it represents a high point of Modernism.

Not much happens, it is basically the story of one day during which Leopold Bloom gets up, walks around Dublin, meets many people along the way including Stephen Dedalus with whom he visits a brothel and gets drunk. And then he goes home and lies with his wife Molly. Joyce reproduces a parody of the epic traveling of Ulysses through Bloom's wandering. He follows the Homeric model.

18 episodes - problems, conflicts, triumphs and tragedies of the classical world are the same of the modern world. The modern man is not perfect, he is not the hero.

Joyce uses the interior monologue simulates the working of consciousness including incomplete sentences, thoughts not connected, sudden changes of tenses. -> increased sense of realism - he preserves everything goes through mind. Symbolic system - it includes many different cultures and it was not accept when it was first published -> encyclopedic novel.

Ulysses = Leopold Bloom -- Telemachus = Stephen Dedalus -- Penelope = Molly Bloom

Finnegans Wake - published in 1939. It is like a dream-sequence. The real protagonist is language , because Joyce mixed different languages altogether ma made up words, using word games and multilingual expressions - in some words are packed the sense of at least two words, the meaning of his words is never final.