Joyce, James. (1882 - 1941).
W o r k
- concerned exclusively with his native Dublin: a microcosm, a small-scale model of all human life and experience, of all history, and of all geography
Dubliners (1914):
- a series of originally 12 short stories: 3 deal with childhood, 3 with adolescence, 3 with mature life, and 3 with public life
- Dublin: ‘the centre of paralysis’, its citizens are bound up in private concerns and incapable to judge properly their experience
- works with epiphany = ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation’ of some basic truth of life
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916):
- an autobiography woven into a novel
- follows the growth of an artist’s mind and his assuming of the priesthood of the artist
Ulysses (1922):
- an account of 1 day in the lives of citizens of Dublin: involves a limited number of events, a limited number of people, and a limited environment x but: aspires to create a microcosm:
- each of the novel's characters and episodes corresponds in some way to Homer's Odyssey: Bloom is the modern Ulysses, Molly the counterpart of Penelope, and Stephen the counterpart of Telemachus
- Leopold Bloom: both Jew and Dubliner, exile and citizen
- Stephen Dedalus: the artist from the Portrait, replaces Bloom's dead son
- Molly Bloom: concludes the novel with her long and extraordinarily unpunctuated monologue presenting her experiences as woman
- linguistic virtuosity: dense pattern of allusions and puns, the stream of consciousness method, mingling of the past and present, etc.
- symbolically presents the paradoxes of human loneliness and sociability, the problems of the relations between parent and child, between the generations, and between the sexes
=> makes Bloom Everyman, and makes Dublin the World
Finnegans Wake (1939):
- a symbolic Irishman’s cosmic dream
- modelled on the cyclical theory of history by Giambattista Vico: the repetitive phases are the divine, aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic
- uses words with several different meanings at once, draws them from several different languages at once, and fuses them in all sorts of ways to achieve whole clusters of meanings simultaneously
- gives up realism altogether: not the plot x but: the punning language bears the meaning
- threatens to become a self-referential series of echoes, puns, acrostics, and dense literary and historical allusions
Basics
(Picture: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. (1882 - 1941). Irish expatriate. -
Work
Novelist. Short story writer. Author of Ulysses (1922). -
Genre
Modernist fiction.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Quote
"and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
The conclusion of Ulysses (1922).