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Introducing James Joyce

Introducing James Joyce. 1882-1941 three eras: Victorian, Early Modern, Late Modern Irish Catholic ~ High Modernist ~ European Exile. Irish Catholic. An oppressed people (British colony) Agitation of late 1800’s Parnell and Home Rule Betrayal and disappointment. Early Years.

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Introducing James Joyce

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  1. Introducing James Joyce 1882-1941 three eras: Victorian, Early Modern, Late Modern Irish Catholic ~ High Modernist ~ European Exile

  2. Irish Catholic • An oppressed people (British colony) • Agitation of late 1800’s • Parnell and Home Rule • Betrayal and disappointment

  3. Early Years • Born into new Catholic middle class • Family’s decline • Jesuit education • Education in the City of Dublin • Vocation: from Priest to Poet

  4. Love and Exile • Experiences Paris (1902-03) • Death of Mother (1903) • Meets Nora Barnacle (June 1904) • Leaves Ireland (October 1904) • The Continent: Trieste, Rome, Zurich, Paris

  5. Dubliners (1914) • 15 stories, written 1903-4 (12), 1906 (2) and 1907 (“The Dead”) • “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 center of paralysis.” • “I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

  6. Joyce on Dubliners • “I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order.” • “I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness.” • “What’s the matter with you is that you’re afraid to live. You and people like you. This city is suffering from hemiplegia [paralysis] of the will.”

  7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) • Highly autobiographical (but beware!) • A declaration of artistic independence • Highly modernist: stream-of-consciousness, confluence of naturalism and symbolism • Long composition: essay (“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” ~ 1904), early novel (Stephen Hero ~ 1904-06), finished novel (1907-08, 1914)

  8. Importance of A Portrait • THE Modernist bildungsroman (novel of education) and kunstlerroman (novel of the making of an artist) • Liberating style and themes • The anguish and exhilaration of gaining power over language • Develops through style as much as through plot

  9. Joyce and Modernism • The Experience of World War I (1914-1918) • Pound’s dictum: “Make it new” • The Great Questioners: Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud • An era of Revolution • Fragmentation • Order: myth, art

  10. Ulysses (1922) • The great modernist epic • Mythic method: the past and the present • Extends Joyce’s experiments with style to the extreme: style becomes the plot • “With me, the thought is always simple” • “I have discovered that I can do anything with language I want”

  11. Finnegans Wake (1939) • Composed from 1922 to 1939 • “Work in Progress” (only Nora knew the title) • An unclassifiable work: Dream? Scripture? Joke? Philosophy of language? Myth? • The Dream of Everyman and Everywoman, in Everylanguage

  12. Death of Joyce • A war refugee: fled Paris, arrived in Switzerland • Illness of daughter Lucia • Despondent over reception of Finnegans Wake • Died on 13 January, 1941, 3 weeks after reaching Switzerland

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