James+Joyce

James Joyce was the first and the most important among the great experimentalists of the 20th century. He was born in Dublin from a good family in decline and was educated in his native town at Jesuit schools and University College. He took no part in the Irish literary revival, which accompanied Irish political nationalism, because he felt the Irish environment frustrating and provincial. Although he loved Ireland he saw patriotism as a backward movement which paralysed the development of a free spirit in Ireland. He refused the stagnant and stifling atmosphere of Dublin and in 1904 he left Ireland. Joyce died in Zürich at the age of 59. A Timeline of Joyce’s life
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 * [[image:DSCN1977.JPG width="164" height="227"]]James Joyce (1882-1941) **
 * 1882 || Joyce is born in Rathgar, Dublin on February 2nd ||
 * 1888 || Begins school at Conglowes Wood College ||
 * 1893 || Goes to Belvedere College ||
 * 1899 || Begins college at University College, Dublin ||
 * 1900 || Publishes 'Ibsen's New Drama' ||
 * 1901 || 'The Day of the Rabblement' is published ||
 * 1902 || Joyce makes his first trip to Paris ||
 * 1903 || Joyce's mother, Mary Jane Joyce, dies ||
 * 1904 || Elopes with Nora; begins sketching //A Portrait// ||
 * 1905 || Giorgio, James and Nora's son, is born; they move to Trieste ||
 * 1906 || Live briefly in Rome; Most likely date of writing of //Stephen Hero// ||
 * 1907 || Lucia, James and Nora's daughter, is born; they move back to Trieste; //Chamber Music// is published ||
 * 1911 || Gives lectures on Shakespeare in Trieste ||
 * 1914 || //Dubliners// published; //A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man// is serialized in //The Egoist// ||
 * 1915 || The Joyces move to Zürich; work on //Ulysses// resumes; //Exiles// is written ||
 * 1916 || //A Portrait// is published in the United States ||
 * 1917 || //A Portrait// is published in Britain ||
 * 1918 || The serialization of //Ulysses// in //The Little Review// begins ||
 * 1920 || The Joyce's move to Paris and the serialization of EM>Ulysses stops ||
 * 1922 || //Ulysses// is published in Paris ||
 * 1924 || The first section of //Work in Progress// is published in //Transatlantic Review I// ||
 * 1927 || //Poems Pennyeach// is published ||
 * 1939 || //Finnegans Wake// is published ||
 * 1941 || Joyce dies in Zürich at the age of 59 ||

James Joyce is at once Dublin's most local and most international writer. In his novels the city gains a universal identity like Homer's Mediterranean or Biblical Jerusalem, transcendental, yet ruthlessly realistic. Today his name is forever linked with that of Dublin. Taking refuge from war-torn Europe in neutral Zurich, Joyce worked on the novel which would revolutionise world literature and make Dublin eternally his own. In Ulysses he reconstructed an entire Dublin day in June 1904 and made it the stuff of a modern epic, full of real people, real places, real names and topical allusions. The modern Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, steers his way through a city which is by turns beguiling, hospitable or oppressive. Although Joyce's candid descriptions of human organs at work caused the book to be banned in Britain and the United States for many years after its publication by the courageous Sylvia Beach in Paris in 1922, Ulysses earned him international acclaim. Joyce, who had moved to Paris in 1920, was based there for nearly twenty years. He became a famous but elusive figure avoiding interviews and public appearances and resolutely maintaining his independence of any movement, political, social or literary, which tried to claim him. Devoted to his immediate family - his wife Nora, his children Giorgio and Lucia, and later Giorgio's wife Helen and their son Stephen - he also brought with him a collection of family portraits, inherited from his father, every time he changed his apartment (at least an annual occurrence).

Surrounded by a select circle of friends, he worked for seventeen years on his last novel, the complex masterpiece Finnegans Wake, in which Dublin is once again the centre of the universe and the theatre of all human history. Finnegans Wake appeared in May 1939, on the eve of the war and the occupation of France. The Joyces sought refuge in Vichy and finally got permission to return to Zurich in December 1940. A month later Joyce was taken ill, and died of peritonitis on 13th January 1941. Joyce’s intention in writing Dubliners, in his own words was to write a chapter of the moral history of his country, **and he chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to him the centre of paralysis.** He tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: __childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life.__ The Sisters, An Encounter and Araby are stories from Childhood. Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants and The Boarding House are stories from Adolescence. A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay and A Painful Case are all stories concerned with Mature Life. Stories from Public Life are Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother and Grace. The Dead is the last story in the collection and probably Joyce’s greatest. It stands alone and, as the title would indicate, is concerned with death. ||
 * ** DUBLINERS **

DUBLINERS
Dublin, Joyce's city of birth is represented as the symbol of the entire world, like a dead background. The theme of death is common in his novels: the last is "The dead". His novels were written between 1903 and 1914, and were published in 1915. They are divided into four parts, like the human life: - 3 stories about children - 4 stories about young boys - 4 stories about adults - 3 stories about public life The last story is a sort of summing up of the themes of each story. Dubliners are chronicles of spiritual, political and social paralysis of a city. The fifteen novels of Dubliners reflect an Ireland disappointed, annoyed and displeased. Captives of boredom, soul and feelings become dry, the characters of these stories apparently banal, try to escape from the immobility of their country. The common elements of the stories are: THE THEMES: - Paralysis; - Concreteness of reality opposed to the need of spirituality. - Money like the symbol of a repressed wish. - The negative Irishman, drunk and violent. - The hope of escape and the feeling of suffocation; it isn’t present in the later novels, because the adults have lost any hope. - The East, connected with the escaping theme. The East is far from reality and from everyday life.

THE MOVEMENT: The travel, often useless, of the character to find something. All the characters escape or try to escape from Dublin in search of an "Eden", which they can't find. THE EPIFANY: Is the discovery of reality (from the Magi), the moment of revelation. Joyce is often negative when the main characters discover something new. Many small things contribute to this factor. THE MUSIC: A vital form of art in many parts of the world (for example in Italy), but not in Ireland. It's a way to escape and helps the memory and the stream of consciousness. THE IRISHNESS: Being Irish, oppressed by traditions, morality and customs. THE WINDOW: There are two sorts of people: who looks out of the window and who looks through the window into the house. Outside the life passes; the one who looks out from the windows doesn't live really, but he looks the other people living. It's a symbol of apathy, of the people, who don't take part in social life. ** Eveline (1914 ** ) Eveline belongs to a collection of fifteen short stories which was completed in 1904, but not published until 1914, under the title Dubliners. As the title suggests, the stories are set in Dublin. In these stories Joyce describes the "paralysis" of his native city and the sense of stagnation which entrappes its inhabitants. Each story portrays either a failure or a defeat of its main character. In this short story Eveline, the protagonist, is defeated by resignation: she dreams of escaping from her ugly life, but at the crucial moment she is powerless to act. The story deals with Eveline's past, present and future. In the present Eveline lives with her father, her younger brother and her sister. She is fed up with her life: her family is quite poor, her father is violent, her mother is died and she doesn't like her job (she works as a shop assistant). Eveline's past is different from the present: in the past she was quite happy: her father was not bad and her mother was still alive. She has a fiancé, Frank, who represents her hope for a change. She likes him, but I think that she doesn't really love him ("Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too"). She is planning to marry him and elope with him in order to leave home and escape from her unhappy and hard life. In her future life she will be Frank's wife and she will start a new life in Buenos Ayres. Eveline is facing a dilemma of reality (her present life) vs dream (her future life). Her dilemma is also one of prison vs liberty: in some ways Dublin is a prison because of its paralyzing effects on its inhabitants and Buenos Ayres represents the freedom. Her attitude towards her life changes during the story: at first she doesn't like her present life, but at the end she doesn't mind it. When she is in her living room waiting for the time to leave some memories of her past come before her: the games she used to play with her friends, the different attitude of her father and her mother's death. She also remembers that she promised her mother that she would look after her family after her death. Later she goes to meet Frank at the quay. When the moment comes to go on board the ship, she changes her mind and refuses to go. She can't find the courage to cut with the past. The sense of resignation which has kept her at home up to now triumphs over her desire to escape. There is an antithesis between Eveline's and Frank's actions in the last part of the story: stillness / movement and passivity / activity. At the beginning of the story Joyce uses an omniscient third-person narrator that throughout the story is replaced by a third-person narration from Eveline point of view. He uses the following devices: - interior monologue and point of view shifting from external narration to inside Eveline's mind, referring her thoughts ("Was that wise?" (30), "Escape! She must escape!"(110)); - flashback, when he talks about Eveline's past. Shift in time are very often (for example: "Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years. [...] Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided"). The language reproduces the plain vocabulary and simple syntax of the character.

Gabriel Conroy - The main character in "The Dead" and the most important character in //Dubliners.// Gabriel isGretta's husband, a mildly successful writer and teacher. After the jovial Christmas party at his aunts' house, Gabriel feels extremely drawn to Gretta; when he learns that she has been thinking of a young man, Michael Furey, with whom she used to be in love, he experiences an agonizing moment of shame followed by the realization that no human being can ever truly know another. Gretta Conroy - Gabriel's wife in "The Dead," who hears the song "The Lass of Aughrim" and remembers the dead lover of her girlhood, Michael Furey, who used to sing the same song. Miss Ivors - A young woman in "The Dead" with whom Gabriel dances. Miss Ivors is an ardent nationalist, and she accuses Gabriel of being a West Briton. Then, she inexplicably leaves the dance early, and no one is able to tell whether she is really upset or not. Michael Furey - A young boy who died at seventeen, deeply in love with Gretta Conroy. Before Gretta left him to attend a convent school, Michael Furey snuck out to see her on a rainy night. The rain exacerbated his illness, and he died a week later. "I think he died for me," Gretta says of him.
 * The Dead" [] **