JAMES JOYCE A LOOK AT HIS LIFE, TIMES AND LITERATURE

BY

CONOR MORAN

James Joyce was born in Rathgar in Dublin. He was part of a large and poor family. He went to University College in Dublin. His originality lay in evolving a literary form to express the complexity of the human mind. He revolutionised the form of the novel in English with his ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. His key works are the short story collection like Dubliners (1914); A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); Ulysses (1922), which is regarded as a masterpiece, and Finnegens Wake (1939)

EDUCATION AND BACKGROUND

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Rathgar, near Dublin, in 1882. The son of a rate collector, Joyce received his early education from the jesuits at Clongowes Wood College, Kildare and Belvedere College, Dublin. He went on to read Modern Languages at Dublin’s University College, graduating in 1902. His first published piece was an essay on Ibsen,’Ibsen’s New Drama’, publised in The Fortnightly Review IN 1900, when he was still an undergraduate.

Joyce published book reviews in the Dublin Daily Express, tried his hand at a career in singing, and started to write down episodes from his daily life. June 16, 1904, the day he fell in love with Nora Barnacle, was later immortalised as “ Bloomsday “ the day in which his masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), takes place. Joyce and Nora left Ireland for Europe in October of the same year to begin life as expatriates, living in Switzerland, Italy, and France. His reasons for choosing self exile may be read in the declaration made by his alter ego, Stephan Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): ”I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, using for my defence that only I allow myself to use-silence, exile and cunning”.

Ulysses, which records the events of a single Dublin day, experiments with language and combines direct narrative with the unspoken and unconscious reactions of the characters. Banned at first for obscenity in the USA and also in the UK, it made a huge impact. Finnegen Wake, a story about a Dublin publican and his family, continued.

Joyce’s experiments with language. In this work the word-coining which is a feature of Ulysses is pushed to the limits, and punning language and allegory are used to explore various level of meaning while attempting a synthesis of all exsistence.

Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus, who appears in his son’s books as Simon Dedalus, was a middle-class catholic with great love for music, but his drinking problem led to the loss of inherited income and property and the constant moving of his family from one rented home to another. In 1903, joyce’s mother, May who was a devout catholic died of cancer. Joyce who was educated at University College, Dublin, where he studied mathemathics and Philosophy as well as languages, showed strong literary tendenices very early in life, however, on completion of his degree he was rebuffed by the leaders of the Irish literary revival: he was anti-clerical, comparing the catholic clergy to ‘tyrannous ice, he attacked W.B. Yates for surrendering to the Nationalistics Ireland; and he demonstrated in a satrical sketch his antipathy to Patrick Pearse. In June 1904 Joyce met and fell in love with a women called Nora Barnicle (1883 1951).She was a charbermaid in Dublin; they married in 1932.He drew upon his love for nora with several descriptions of female characters in his books.

At this time Joyce had published a few sketches and reviews but was unable to make a living, and on the 8 of October 1904 he and Nora travelled to Trieste, Italy, where he taught English; Joyce’s two children Giorgio and Lucia were both born here, in 1905 and 1907 respectively. This was a more fruitful writing phase, but Joyce’s work was plagued by delays in publication. A book of lyrics called Chamber Music, which Joyce had completed some years earlier, was published in 1907, while a volume of short stories, called Dubliners, was completed in 1906 but remained unpublished for nine years, because of wrangling with publishers over their demands for excisions. Meanwhile the partly autobiographical

The Joyce family moved to Gerand-le-Puy, near Vichy, France, at the outbreak of World War II but then on December 14 1940 the family, except Lucia who was in a sanatorium, entered Switzerland. On January 10 1941 Joyce was taken to hospital suffering from severe stomach pains, where he died three days

Short Questions

Question 1 LONG REVIEW of

Joyce: The Definitive Biography

By Richard Ellmann

This book first appeared in 1959,none have come close to matching its achievement. To be fair, Ellen did have some distinct advantages. For starters, there’s his deep mastery of Irish literature demonstrated in his books on Yeats and Wilde. He’s also an admirable stylist himself—graceful, witty, and happily unintimidated by his brilliant subjects. In addition, he seems to have an uncanny grasp on Joyce’s personality: his reverence for the Irishman’s literary accomplishments is always balanced by a kind of bemused affection for his faults. Ellmann’s account always shows us a genius and a human being.

Short Questions

Q3 REVIEW

ONE OF THE BOOKS USED FOR THIS PROJECT WAS

JOYCE: THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY AND IT WAS WRITTEN BY MICHEAL GURNOW

THIS BOOK WAS PUBLISHED BY 2000 IN

LONDON IN GULAND MAC MULAN

THIS WAS A GOOD SOURCE OF INFORMATION BECAUSE

1 IT WAS WRITTEN IN A CLEAR AND EASY WAY TO

UNDERSTAND

2 IT CONTAINS PLENTY OF PICTURES, PHOTOS AND

DOCUMENTS AND IT HAD A GOOD BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Q4 SKILLS

TWO SKILLS I LEARNT WERE

1 LEARNING TO USE MICROSOFT WORD

2 HOW TO PRINT DOCUMENTS AND

HOW TO WRITE A PROPER ESSAY FOR LEAVING CERT USING FOOTNOTES AND A LIST OF BOOKS AT THE END {BIBLIOGRAPHY}