JAMES JOYCE1882-1941

JOYCE BIOGRAPHY • Born on February 2, 1882 (Groundhog Day!)• Eldest of 10; middle class family’s gradual descent down socioeconomic ladder• Jesuit education – Clongowes Boarding School, Belvedere High School, University College at Trinity• Irish Nationalist Movement – celebration of Irish culture/identity over English colonization• end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Stephen Dedalus (JJ’s alter-ego) leaves Ireland for continet (1902) – to escape the nets/trappings of Ireland (fathers) & to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”

• Joyce returns to Dublin shortly after leaving due to mother’s

impending death (thus begins Ulysses …)• June 16, 1904 meets Nora Barnacle (“Bloomsday”)• 1904 – leaves Ireland for continent (Zurich, Trieste, Rome, Paris), though never really “leaves” Dublin (subject of all his writings)

• Dubliners (1914), Portrait (1916), Ulysses (1922) Finnegans Wake (1939) • Two children, married (1931), loses eyesight, dies 1941 (buried in Zurich, Switzerland)

DUBLINERS: PUBLISHING1906: printer objected to offensive aspects of “Two Gallants”

1907-08: rejected by five publishers

1909: accepted by Dublin publisher

1910: before publication, more objections, this time to references to real

people & places in Dublin and to “Ivy Day” references to sex life of

Edward VII.

1912: after publication delays, publisher again refused to print it

(first edition burned by publisher, but Joyce managed to obtain a

set of proofs from this edition)

1914: finally published by a London publisher

1916: published in New York

“Ten years of my life have been consumed in correspondence and litigation about my book Dubliners. It was rejected by 40 publishers; three times set up, and once burnt. It cost me about 3,000 francs in postage, fees, train and boat fare, for I was in correspondence with 110 newspapers, 7 solicitors, 3 societies, 40 publishers and several men of letters about it. All refused to aid me, except Ezra Pound. In the end it was published, in 1914, word for word as I wrote it in 1905.”

- James Joyce (1917)

DUBLINERS - ORGANIZATIONChildhood: “The Sisters”

“An Encounter”“Araby”

Adolescence: “Eveline”“After the Race”“Two Gallants” “The Boarding House”

Maturity: “A Little Cloud” “Counterparts” “Clay”“A Painful Case”

Public Life: “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” “A Mother”“Grace”

Coda: “The Dead”

DUBLINERS – STYLE & THEME1. Poetic Technique

a. Like Poe, Hemingway, Joyce was first a lyric poetb. Hence, compression & intensity of lyric poetryc. Reliance on IMAGE (a fraction of experience containing

emotional and intellectual power) d. Let the effect trail off without comment (Joyce never

draws attention and is never involved in helping us!)e. Joyce demands that the reader puts details together and

find greater unity/meaningf. Joyce forces us to read at a level we’ve never read before

… in a sense, we become co-creators in Joyce’s storiesg. Like Flaubert, no authorial intrusion (actions speak for

themselves)h. Finally, Joyce is to traditional narrative fiction what a

collage is to traditional realistic painting, or what a montage is to traditional linear narrative film

2. Epiphanya. Feast of Epiphany – celebrates recognition of Divinity in the

Christ child b. In other words, the Epiphany celebrates the recognition of the

spiritual in an ordinary settingc. For Joyce, epiphanies occur in common, everyday moments …

the explosion of meaning in something quite normal … or, as he puts it, “the sudden revelation of the whatness of the thing”

d. Transformation of the Actual/Real into the Abstract/Symbole. Like the transubstantiation of bread/wine into something holy,

Joyce fancies himself a “secular priest,” transubstantiating the trivial into something meaningful (Joyce’s religion = Art)

f. Joyce to his brother Stanislaus: “Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of the tram? Consider if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become … It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me.”

3. Paralysisa. “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of

my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.”

b. Unresolved, fragmented, “slice of life” storiesc. In a sense , these are stories about nothing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjDnGBrhhaQ