Transcript James Joyce - Learning Literature

James Joyce
• Born in a suburb of Dublin, on February 2nd
1882
• In 1888 Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit
school
• 1893 Belvedere College, a Jesuit school
• 1898 University College Dublin
• 1902 Degree in Foreign Languages
James Joyce
• 1904: met Nora Barnacle (they married in 1931).
• 1904-1915: they lived in Trieste (from July 1906 to March 1907 in
Rome). Joyce contributed to “Il Piccolo della Sera” and met Italo
Svevo
• 1912 – Last journey to Dublin. Joyce never visited Ireland again
• 1913 – Correspondence with Ezra Pound
• 1914 – Joyce met Ezra Pound
• 1915 – Joyce moved to Zurich
• 1920 – Joyce moved to Paris. Here he met Hemingway, T.S. Eliot,
Wyndham Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, F.S. Fitzgerald, Gertrude
Stein
• 1940 – in Zurich again
• 1941 – Joyce dies in Zurich in 1941
James Joyce: literary career
• 1900: “Ibsen’s New Drama”, Fortnightly Review
• 1900-1902: short poems later collected in Chamber Music and prose
pieces called “epiphanies”(W.B. Yeats)
• 1904: A Portrait of the Artist (essay), then turned into the novel
• 1904: “The Sisters”, Irish Homestead
• 1904-5 Stephen Hero (ch. 14-25)
• 1914- 1915: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man serialized in “The Egoist”
• 1914: Dubliners
• 1918: Exiles
• 2 February 1922: Ulysses, published in Paris by Shakespeare & Co.
• 1923: starts writing Finnegans Wake
• 1934: Ulysses published in the USA
• 1936: Ulysses published in the UK
• 1939: Finnegans Wake published in the UK and the USA
Dubliners: historical background
• 1801: Act of Union: Ireland became part of the
extended United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland, ruled by a united parliament at
Westminster in London
• 19th and 20th centuries: rise of modern Irish
nationalism
• Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891): Irish
Parliamentary Party. Campaign for Home Rule:
autonomy of Ireland within the union
Dubliners: historical backgound
• The Act of Union 1801: Beginning of Dublin’s decline in both
political and economic terms (highest death rate in the country)
• “The lack of dynamism from the rural Irish economy and the failure
of Dublin businesses to manufacture, and, in some cases, even to
distribute the manufactured goods which rural Ireland needed, plus
the apparent stagnation of the port in the third quarter of the
nineteenth century all meant that Dublin failed to provide adequate
employment either for the indigenuous population or even for a
small proportion of the surplus populations of rural Ireland” Mary
Daly, Dublin, The Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History
1860-1914, 1984
• Dubliners: lower middle class, petit-bourgeois world of shopkeepers
and tradesmen, functionaries of one kind or another, clerks, bank
officials, salesmen.
Dubliners: historical background
• 1914: Home Rule Bill passed (with the
exclusion of the six counties of Ulster) but
suspended for the duration of WW1
• 1916: Easter Rising
• 1920: Government of Ireland Act
• 1922: Irish Free State
• 1937: New Constitution
• 1949: Republic of Ireland
Dubliners
• “I am writing a series of epicleti - ten - for a
paper. I have written one. I call the series
Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia
or paralysis which many consider a city.” (J.
Joyce, Letter to Curran of early 1904)
Dubliners
• 1904: Joyce publishes “The Sisters”, “Eveline”
and “After the Race” in The Irish Homestead
• 1904-6: Joyce wrote all the other stories
except for “The Dead” (1907)
• Joyce submitted the volume for publication to
Grant Richards in 1905 and 1907, and then to
Maunsel & Co., but it was rejected. It was
finally published by Grant Richards in 1914
Dubliners
• “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal
hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the
course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from
having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished lookingglass” James Joyce, Letter to Grant Richards, 23 June 1906
• “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. I have tried to present it to the
indifferent public under four aspects: childhood, adolescence,
maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I
have written it for the most part in the style of scrupulous
meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who
dares to alter it in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever
he has seen or heard” James Joyce, Letter to Grant Richards, 5 May
1906
Dubliners
• Childhood: “The Sisters”, “An Encounter”, “Araby”
• Adolescence: “After the Race”, “The Boarding
House”, “Eveline”, “Two Gallants”
• Maturity: “A Little Cloud”, “Clay”, Counterparts”, “A
Painful Case”
• Public Life: “Ivy Day in the Commitee Room”, “A
Mother”, “Grace”
• “The Dead”
“The Sisters”
• Basic situation derived from “The Old Watchman”, by
Berkeley Campbell, a typical Irish Homestead story
• Gnomon: the remainder of a parallelogram after
removal of a similar parallelogram containing one of its
corners. The stylus of a sundial that throws the shadow
which indicates the hours of the day
• Simony: the selling or giving in exchange of a temporal
thing for a spiritual thing (i.e. buying of a blessing,
purchase of ecclesiastical favour, or of pardons). It
originates from Simon Magus in the Acts of Apostles
who sought to gain spiritual powers by payment
Epiphany
• “By an epiphany he meant sudden spiritual
manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of
speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of
the mind itself”, James Joyce, Stephen Hero