James Joyce(1882-1941)

• Born in Dublin into a middle-class Catholic family.

• His father had been a supporter of Charles Parnell.

• He attended University College, Dublin.

• In 1902, he went on a self-imposed exile Paris, Pula, Trieste.

• At the outbreak of World War I, he left for Zurich.

• In 1920, he moved to Paris.

His Life

• Dubliners (1914)

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

• Ulysses (1922)

• Finnegans Wake (1939)

His Works

A complex relationship

he rejected everything

his works are centred

that was Irish

on Ireland, Dublin

Early 20th - century Dublin

occupies every page written by Joyce

Joyce and Ireland

His self-imposed style had given him the objectivity he needed to write

about Ireland with the necessary emotional and intellectual detachment.

Joyce’s novels show a similar shift from:

•the particular to the universal;

•the lyrical style to the epic style.

Joyce’s Narrative

• A collection of 15 short stories

the failure of self-realisation of an inhabitant of Dublin.

• The first 14 were written by 1905, the last and longest story was

finished by 1907.

• Joyce’s 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’

This sense of paralysis is presented in four stages:

childhood, adolescence, maturity, public life.

Dubliners

• Realistic the degree of perfectly recreating characters,

places, streets, pubs and idioms of Dublin.

• Joyce makes use of a symbolic effect:

it gives the common object an unforeseen depth and becomes the

key to a new view of reality.

• He coined the definition of epiphany:

‘manifestation, showing’ a moment when a simple

object/fact/situation suddenly flashes out with meaning and makes a

person realise his/her condition.

Realism and Symbolism

• The climax to all the other stories

• …and their counterpoint, too

detached objectivity gives place to lyrical intensity.

• Gabriel is the central character of the story:

the best representative of all failed Dubliners;

he is what Joyce would have become if he had stayed in Ireland.

The Dead

• It begins with the Christmas party that the Morkan sisters organise

each year.

• The guests, both Catholic and Protestant, debate crucial arguments

Irish politics in relation to Britain.

• Gabriel Conroy, the Morkan sisters’ nephew, is a journalist who has

an unfulfilled personality he prefers not to expose himself and to

continue his usual life.

• Late at night, Gabriel and Gretta, his wife,

go back to their hotel.

The Story

• Gabriel and Gretta are in their room.

• Gretta has just kissed him:

a song heard at the party brings forth forgotten

memories:

they bring about hidden depths of feeling and a

new awareness of her relationship with Gabriel.

For Gabriel, it comes when he thinks he

has full possession of his wife.

I Think He Died for Me

Gretta throws herself crying on to the bed.

She reveals she is crying for a boy she used to know long ago.

This revelation is not sudden, but gradual.

It brings about a series of further emotional shocks for Gabriel:

that the boy, Michael Furey, died for love of Gretta.

The End

• Gabriel has just listened to Gretta’s story.

• He reflects on how poor a part he has played in his wife’s life and

feels his own pettiness.

• In the end, he feels elevated to the world of spirit, the region of the

dead, symbolically mapped by the snow falling all over Ireland.

The Living and the Dead