Posted on Jan 14, 2021
Biography of James Joyce, Influential Irish Novelist
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On January 13, 1941, James Joyce, novelist (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses), died in Zurich Switzerland, at the age of 58. From the article:
"James Joyce (February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941) was an Irish novelist who is widely considered to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. His novel Ulysses was controversial when published in 1922 and was banned in many locations, yet it has become one of the most discussed and studied books over the past century.
Born in Dublin, Joyce grew up in Ireland and is considered the quintessential Irish writer, yet he often rejected his homeland. He spent most of his adult life living on the European continent, obsessing over Ireland while creating in Ulysses a portrait of Irish life as experienced by Dublin's residents during one particular day, June 16, 1904.
Fast Facts: James Joyce
•Full Name: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
•Known For: Innovative and highly influential Irish writer. Author of novels, short stories, and poetry
•Born: February 2, 1882 in Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland
•Parents: John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray
•Died: January 13, 1941 in Zurich, Switzerland
•Education: University College Dublin
•Movement: Modernism
•Selected Works: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake.
•Spouse: Nora Barnacle Joyce
•Children: son Giorgio and daughter Lucia
•Notable Quote: "When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove." (Lecture Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages)
Early Life
James Joyce was born February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a Dublin suburb. His parents, John and Mary Jane Murray Joyce, were both musically talented, a trait which was passed along to their son. The family was large, with James the oldest of ten children who survived childhood.
The Joyces were part of an emerging Irish nationalist middle class of the late 1800s, Catholics who identified with the politics of Charles Stewart Parnell and expected the eventual home rule of Ireland. Joyce's father had a job as a tax collector, and the family was secure until the early 1890s, when his father lost his job, possibly because of a drinking problem. The family began to slide into financial insecurity.
As a child, Joyce was educated by Irish Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College in Kildare, Ireland, and later at Belvedere College in Dublin (through some family connections he was able to attend at reduced tuition). He eventually attended University College Dublin, focusing on philosophy and languages. Following his graduation in 1902 he traveled to Paris, intent on pursuing medical studies.
Joyce found he could not afford the fees for the schooling he sought, but he stayed in Paris and subsisted on money earned teaching English, writing articles, and with money occasionally sent to him by relatives back in Ireland. After a few months in Paris, he received an urgent telegram in May 1903 calling him back to Dublin as his mother was ill and dying.
Joyce had rejected Catholicism, but his mother asked him to go to confession and take Holy Communion. He refused. After she slipped into a coma, his mother's brother asked Joyce and his brother Stanislaus to kneel and pray at her bedside. They both refused. Joyce later used the facts surrounding his mother's death in his fiction. The character Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man refused his dying mother's wish and feels tremendous guilt for it.
Meeting Nora Barnacle
Joyce remained in Dublin following his mother's death and managed to make a modest living teaching and writing book reviews. The most important meeting of Joyce's life occurred when he saw a young woman with reddish-brown hair on the street in Dublin. She was Nora Barnacle, a native of Galway, in the west of Ireland, who was working in Dublin as a hotel maid. Joyce was struck by her and asked her for a date.
Joyce and Nora Barnacle agreed to meet in a few days and walk about the city. They fell in love, and would go on to live together and eventually marry.
Their first date occurred on June 16, 1904, the same day during which the action in Ulysses takes place. By selecting that particular date as the setting of his novel, Joyce was memorializing what he considered a momentous day in his life. As a practical matter, as that day stood out so clearly in his mind, he could remember specific details while writing Ulysses more than a decade later.
Early Publications
•Chamber Music (collection of poems, 1907)
•Dubliners (collection of short stories, 1914)
•A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (novel, 1916)
•Exiles (play, 1918)
Joyce was determined to leave Ireland, and on October 8, 1904, he and Nora left together to live on the European continent. They would remain fiercely devoted to each other, and in some ways Nora was Joyce's great artistic muse. They would not legally marry until 1931. Living together outside of marriage would have been an enormous scandal in Ireland. In Trieste, Italy, where they eventually settled, no one seemed to care.
In the summer of 1904, while still living in Dublin, Joyce began publishing a series of short stories in a newspaper, the Irish Homestead. The stories would eventually grow into a collection titled Dubliners. On their first publication, readers wrote to the newspaper to complain about the puzzling stories, but today Dubliners is considered an influential collection of short fiction.
In Trieste, Joyce rewrote a piece of autobiographical fiction he had first attempted back in Dublin. But he also worked on a volume of poetry. His first published book was thus his poetry collection, Chamber Music, which was published in 1907.
It ultimately took Joyce ten years to get his short story collection into print. Joyce's realistic portrayal of city dwellers was considered immoral by a number of publishers and printers. Dubliners finally appeared in 1914.
Joyce's experimental fiction proceeded with his next work, an autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The book follows the development of Stephen Dedalus, a character much like Joyce himself, a sensitive and artistically inclined young man determined to rebel against society's strictures. The book was published in 1916, and was reviewed widely by literary publications. Critics seemed impressed by the author's obvious skill, but were often offended or simply puzzled by his portrayal of life in Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1918 Joyce wrote a play, Exiles. The plot concerns an Irish writer and his wife who have lived in Europe and return to Ireland. The husband, as he believes in spiritual freedom, encourages a romantic relationship between his wife and his best friend (which is never consummated). The play is considered a minor work of Joyce's, but some of the ideas in it appeared later in Ulysses.
Ulysses and Controversy
•Ulysses (novel, 1922)
•Pomes Penyeach (collection of poems, 1927)
As Joyce was struggling to publish his earlier work, he began an undertaking that would make his reputation as a literary giant. The novel Ulysses, which he began writing in 1914, is loosely based on the epic poem by Homer, The Odyssey. In the Greek classic, the protagonist Odysseus is a king and a great hero who is wandering homeward following the Trojan War. In Ulysses (the Latin name for Odysseus), a Dublin advertising salesman named Leopold Bloom, spends a typical day traveling about the city. Other characters in the book include Bloom's wife, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictitious alter ego who had been the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Ulysses is structured in 18 untitled chapters, each of which correspond to particular episodes of The Odyssey. Part of the innovation of Ulysses is that each chapter (or episode) is written in a different style (as the chapters were not only unmarked but unnamed, the change in presentation is what would alert the reader that a new chapter had begun).
It would be difficult to overstate the complexity of Ulysses, or the amount of detail and care that Joyce put into it. Ulysses has become known for Joyce's use of stream of consciousness and interior monologues. The novel is also remarkable for Joyce's use of music throughout and for his sense of humor, as wordplay and parody are employed throughout the text.
On Joyce's 40th birthday, February 2, 1922, Ulysses was published in Paris (some excerpts had been published earlier in literary journals). The book was immediately controversial, with some writers and critics, including novelist Ernest Hemingway, declaring it a masterpiece. But the book was also considered obscene and was banned in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States. After a court battle, the book was finally ruled by an American judge to be a work of literary merit and not obscene, and it was legally published in America in 1934.
Ulysses remained controversial, even after it was ruled to be legal. Critics battled over its worth, and while it is considered to be a classic work, it has had detractors who found it baffling. In recent decades the book has become controversial because of battles over which particular edition constitute the genuine book. As Joyce made so many changes to his manuscript, and it is believed printers (some of whom could not understand English) made mistaken changes, various versions of the novel exist. A version published in the 1980s sought to correct many mistakes, but some Joyce scholars objected to the "corrected" edition, claiming it injected more mistakes and was itself a faulty edition.
Joyce and Nora, their son Giorgio, and daughter Lucia had moved to Paris while he was writing Ulysses. After the book's publication they remained in Paris. Joyce was respected by other writers and at times would socialize with people like Hemingway or Ezra Pound. But he mostly devoted himself to a new written work which consumed the rest of his life.
Finnegans Wake
•Collected Poems (collection of previously published poems and works, 1936)
•Finnegans Wake (novel, 1939)
Joyce's final book, Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, is puzzling, and it was no doubt intended to be. The book seems to be written in several languages at once, and the bizarre prose on the page seems to represent a dream-like state. It has often been noted that if Ulysses was the story of a day, Finnegans Wake is the story of a night.
The title of the book is based on an Irish-American vaudeville song in which an Irish worker, Tim Finnegan, dies in an accident. At his wake, liquor is spilled on his corpse and he rises from the dead. Joyce deliberately removed the apostrophe from the title, as he intended a pun. In Joyce's joke, the mythical Irish hero Finn MacCool is waking, therefore Finn again wakes. Such wordplay and complicated allusions are rampant through more than 600 pages of the book.
As might be expected, Finnegans Wake is Joyce's least-read book. Yet it has its defenders, and literary scholars have debated its merits for decades.
Literary Style and Themes
Joyce's writing style evolved over time, and each of his major works can be said to have its own distinct style. But, in general, his writings are marked with a remarkable attention to language, an innovative use of symbolism, and the use of interior monologue to portray the thoughts and feelings of a character.
Joyce's work is also defined by its complexity. Joyce exercised great care in his writing, and readers and critics have noticed layers and layers of meaning in his prose. In his fiction, Joyce made references to a wide variety of subjects, from classical literature to modern psychology. And his experiments with language involved the use of formal elegant prose, Dublin slang, and, especially in Finnegans Wake, the use of foreign terms, often as elaborate puns holding multiple meanings.
Death and Legacy
Joyce had been suffering from various health problems for many years by the time of the publication of Finnegans Wake. He had undergone many surgeries for eye problems, and was nearly blind.
When World War II broke out, the Joyce family fled from France to neutral Switzerland to escape the Nazis. Joyce died in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13, 1941, after surgery for a stomach ulcer.
It is virtually impossible to overstate the importance of James Joyce on modern literature. Joyce's new methods of composition had a profound impact, and writers who followed him were often influenced and inspired by his work. Another great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, considered Joyce an influence, as did the American novelist William Faulkner.
In 2014, the New York Times Book Review published an article headlined "Who Are James Joyce's Modern Heirs?" In the opening of the article, a writer notes, "Joyce’s work is so canonical that in some sense we are all inescapably his heirs." It is true that many critics have noted nearly all serious writers of fiction in the modern era have, directly or indirectly, been influenced by Joyce's work.
Stories from Dubliners have often been collected in anthologies, and Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has often been used in high school and college classes.
Ulysses changed what a novel could be, and literary scholars continue to obsess over it. The book is also widely read and loved by ordinary readers, and every year on June 16th, "Bloomsday" celebrations (named for the main character, Leopold Bloom) are held in locations around the globe, including Dublin (of course), New York, and even Shanghai, China."
"James Joyce (February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941) was an Irish novelist who is widely considered to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. His novel Ulysses was controversial when published in 1922 and was banned in many locations, yet it has become one of the most discussed and studied books over the past century.
Born in Dublin, Joyce grew up in Ireland and is considered the quintessential Irish writer, yet he often rejected his homeland. He spent most of his adult life living on the European continent, obsessing over Ireland while creating in Ulysses a portrait of Irish life as experienced by Dublin's residents during one particular day, June 16, 1904.
Fast Facts: James Joyce
•Full Name: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
•Known For: Innovative and highly influential Irish writer. Author of novels, short stories, and poetry
•Born: February 2, 1882 in Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland
•Parents: John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray
•Died: January 13, 1941 in Zurich, Switzerland
•Education: University College Dublin
•Movement: Modernism
•Selected Works: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake.
•Spouse: Nora Barnacle Joyce
•Children: son Giorgio and daughter Lucia
•Notable Quote: "When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove." (Lecture Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages)
Early Life
James Joyce was born February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a Dublin suburb. His parents, John and Mary Jane Murray Joyce, were both musically talented, a trait which was passed along to their son. The family was large, with James the oldest of ten children who survived childhood.
The Joyces were part of an emerging Irish nationalist middle class of the late 1800s, Catholics who identified with the politics of Charles Stewart Parnell and expected the eventual home rule of Ireland. Joyce's father had a job as a tax collector, and the family was secure until the early 1890s, when his father lost his job, possibly because of a drinking problem. The family began to slide into financial insecurity.
As a child, Joyce was educated by Irish Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College in Kildare, Ireland, and later at Belvedere College in Dublin (through some family connections he was able to attend at reduced tuition). He eventually attended University College Dublin, focusing on philosophy and languages. Following his graduation in 1902 he traveled to Paris, intent on pursuing medical studies.
Joyce found he could not afford the fees for the schooling he sought, but he stayed in Paris and subsisted on money earned teaching English, writing articles, and with money occasionally sent to him by relatives back in Ireland. After a few months in Paris, he received an urgent telegram in May 1903 calling him back to Dublin as his mother was ill and dying.
Joyce had rejected Catholicism, but his mother asked him to go to confession and take Holy Communion. He refused. After she slipped into a coma, his mother's brother asked Joyce and his brother Stanislaus to kneel and pray at her bedside. They both refused. Joyce later used the facts surrounding his mother's death in his fiction. The character Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man refused his dying mother's wish and feels tremendous guilt for it.
Meeting Nora Barnacle
Joyce remained in Dublin following his mother's death and managed to make a modest living teaching and writing book reviews. The most important meeting of Joyce's life occurred when he saw a young woman with reddish-brown hair on the street in Dublin. She was Nora Barnacle, a native of Galway, in the west of Ireland, who was working in Dublin as a hotel maid. Joyce was struck by her and asked her for a date.
Joyce and Nora Barnacle agreed to meet in a few days and walk about the city. They fell in love, and would go on to live together and eventually marry.
Their first date occurred on June 16, 1904, the same day during which the action in Ulysses takes place. By selecting that particular date as the setting of his novel, Joyce was memorializing what he considered a momentous day in his life. As a practical matter, as that day stood out so clearly in his mind, he could remember specific details while writing Ulysses more than a decade later.
Early Publications
•Chamber Music (collection of poems, 1907)
•Dubliners (collection of short stories, 1914)
•A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (novel, 1916)
•Exiles (play, 1918)
Joyce was determined to leave Ireland, and on October 8, 1904, he and Nora left together to live on the European continent. They would remain fiercely devoted to each other, and in some ways Nora was Joyce's great artistic muse. They would not legally marry until 1931. Living together outside of marriage would have been an enormous scandal in Ireland. In Trieste, Italy, where they eventually settled, no one seemed to care.
In the summer of 1904, while still living in Dublin, Joyce began publishing a series of short stories in a newspaper, the Irish Homestead. The stories would eventually grow into a collection titled Dubliners. On their first publication, readers wrote to the newspaper to complain about the puzzling stories, but today Dubliners is considered an influential collection of short fiction.
In Trieste, Joyce rewrote a piece of autobiographical fiction he had first attempted back in Dublin. But he also worked on a volume of poetry. His first published book was thus his poetry collection, Chamber Music, which was published in 1907.
It ultimately took Joyce ten years to get his short story collection into print. Joyce's realistic portrayal of city dwellers was considered immoral by a number of publishers and printers. Dubliners finally appeared in 1914.
Joyce's experimental fiction proceeded with his next work, an autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The book follows the development of Stephen Dedalus, a character much like Joyce himself, a sensitive and artistically inclined young man determined to rebel against society's strictures. The book was published in 1916, and was reviewed widely by literary publications. Critics seemed impressed by the author's obvious skill, but were often offended or simply puzzled by his portrayal of life in Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1918 Joyce wrote a play, Exiles. The plot concerns an Irish writer and his wife who have lived in Europe and return to Ireland. The husband, as he believes in spiritual freedom, encourages a romantic relationship between his wife and his best friend (which is never consummated). The play is considered a minor work of Joyce's, but some of the ideas in it appeared later in Ulysses.
Ulysses and Controversy
•Ulysses (novel, 1922)
•Pomes Penyeach (collection of poems, 1927)
As Joyce was struggling to publish his earlier work, he began an undertaking that would make his reputation as a literary giant. The novel Ulysses, which he began writing in 1914, is loosely based on the epic poem by Homer, The Odyssey. In the Greek classic, the protagonist Odysseus is a king and a great hero who is wandering homeward following the Trojan War. In Ulysses (the Latin name for Odysseus), a Dublin advertising salesman named Leopold Bloom, spends a typical day traveling about the city. Other characters in the book include Bloom's wife, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictitious alter ego who had been the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Ulysses is structured in 18 untitled chapters, each of which correspond to particular episodes of The Odyssey. Part of the innovation of Ulysses is that each chapter (or episode) is written in a different style (as the chapters were not only unmarked but unnamed, the change in presentation is what would alert the reader that a new chapter had begun).
It would be difficult to overstate the complexity of Ulysses, or the amount of detail and care that Joyce put into it. Ulysses has become known for Joyce's use of stream of consciousness and interior monologues. The novel is also remarkable for Joyce's use of music throughout and for his sense of humor, as wordplay and parody are employed throughout the text.
On Joyce's 40th birthday, February 2, 1922, Ulysses was published in Paris (some excerpts had been published earlier in literary journals). The book was immediately controversial, with some writers and critics, including novelist Ernest Hemingway, declaring it a masterpiece. But the book was also considered obscene and was banned in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States. After a court battle, the book was finally ruled by an American judge to be a work of literary merit and not obscene, and it was legally published in America in 1934.
Ulysses remained controversial, even after it was ruled to be legal. Critics battled over its worth, and while it is considered to be a classic work, it has had detractors who found it baffling. In recent decades the book has become controversial because of battles over which particular edition constitute the genuine book. As Joyce made so many changes to his manuscript, and it is believed printers (some of whom could not understand English) made mistaken changes, various versions of the novel exist. A version published in the 1980s sought to correct many mistakes, but some Joyce scholars objected to the "corrected" edition, claiming it injected more mistakes and was itself a faulty edition.
Joyce and Nora, their son Giorgio, and daughter Lucia had moved to Paris while he was writing Ulysses. After the book's publication they remained in Paris. Joyce was respected by other writers and at times would socialize with people like Hemingway or Ezra Pound. But he mostly devoted himself to a new written work which consumed the rest of his life.
Finnegans Wake
•Collected Poems (collection of previously published poems and works, 1936)
•Finnegans Wake (novel, 1939)
Joyce's final book, Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, is puzzling, and it was no doubt intended to be. The book seems to be written in several languages at once, and the bizarre prose on the page seems to represent a dream-like state. It has often been noted that if Ulysses was the story of a day, Finnegans Wake is the story of a night.
The title of the book is based on an Irish-American vaudeville song in which an Irish worker, Tim Finnegan, dies in an accident. At his wake, liquor is spilled on his corpse and he rises from the dead. Joyce deliberately removed the apostrophe from the title, as he intended a pun. In Joyce's joke, the mythical Irish hero Finn MacCool is waking, therefore Finn again wakes. Such wordplay and complicated allusions are rampant through more than 600 pages of the book.
As might be expected, Finnegans Wake is Joyce's least-read book. Yet it has its defenders, and literary scholars have debated its merits for decades.
Literary Style and Themes
Joyce's writing style evolved over time, and each of his major works can be said to have its own distinct style. But, in general, his writings are marked with a remarkable attention to language, an innovative use of symbolism, and the use of interior monologue to portray the thoughts and feelings of a character.
Joyce's work is also defined by its complexity. Joyce exercised great care in his writing, and readers and critics have noticed layers and layers of meaning in his prose. In his fiction, Joyce made references to a wide variety of subjects, from classical literature to modern psychology. And his experiments with language involved the use of formal elegant prose, Dublin slang, and, especially in Finnegans Wake, the use of foreign terms, often as elaborate puns holding multiple meanings.
Death and Legacy
Joyce had been suffering from various health problems for many years by the time of the publication of Finnegans Wake. He had undergone many surgeries for eye problems, and was nearly blind.
When World War II broke out, the Joyce family fled from France to neutral Switzerland to escape the Nazis. Joyce died in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13, 1941, after surgery for a stomach ulcer.
It is virtually impossible to overstate the importance of James Joyce on modern literature. Joyce's new methods of composition had a profound impact, and writers who followed him were often influenced and inspired by his work. Another great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, considered Joyce an influence, as did the American novelist William Faulkner.
In 2014, the New York Times Book Review published an article headlined "Who Are James Joyce's Modern Heirs?" In the opening of the article, a writer notes, "Joyce’s work is so canonical that in some sense we are all inescapably his heirs." It is true that many critics have noted nearly all serious writers of fiction in the modern era have, directly or indirectly, been influenced by Joyce's work.
Stories from Dubliners have often been collected in anthologies, and Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has often been used in high school and college classes.
Ulysses changed what a novel could be, and literary scholars continue to obsess over it. The book is also widely read and loved by ordinary readers, and every year on June 16th, "Bloomsday" celebrations (named for the main character, Leopold Bloom) are held in locations around the globe, including Dublin (of course), New York, and even Shanghai, China."
Biography of James Joyce, Influential Irish Novelist
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The World of James Joyce: His Life & Work documentary (1986)
The authoritative documentary on the man who single-handedly transformed English literature in the 20th century. Check out these James Joyce books on Amazon:...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on January 13, 1941 Irish author and novelist (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses) James Augustine Joyce, died in Zurich Switzerland, at the age of 58.
The World of James Joyce: His Life & Work documentary (1986)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IwrHkNUk24&t=894s
Images:
1. James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in 1929
2. James Joyce 'Men are governed by lines of intellect – women by curves of emotion.
3. Sylvia Beach meets James Joyce in her Parisian English language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, in 1922.
4. Statue of Joyce in Trieste (Italy) by S.Wetzel
Background from {[http://writersinspire.org/content/james-joyce-biography]}
by Cleo Hanaway
James Augustine Joyce, the eldest surviving son of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane ('May') Joyce, was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882. He attended Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boys' school in County Kildare, until his father lost his job as a Rates Collector in 1891. Around the same time, Joyce took 'Aloysius' as his confirmation name. After a brief spell at the Christian Brothers School, all of the Joyce brothers entered Belvedere College, a Jesuit boys' day school; fortunately, the school fees were waived.
In 1894, with the Joyces' finances dwindling further, the family moved house for the fourth time since Joyce's birth. They also sold off their last remaining Cork property. Despite increasing poverty and upheaval, Joyce managed to win a prize for his excellent exam results and wrote an essay on Ulysses which, arguably, sowed the seeds for Joyce's 1922 masterpiece of the same name. In 1896 Joyce was made prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a devotional society. However, he was not as pure as he seemed; Joyce claimed to have begun his ‘sexual life’ later that year, at the age of fourteen.[1]
Education
In 1898, Joyce began studying modern languages at the Royal University (now University College, Dublin). During his time at university Joyce published several papers on literature, history, and politics. He also enjoyed visits to the music hall.[2] Joyce became particularly interested in the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and Irish writer W. B. Yeats. In 1902, on a visit to London, Joyce met Yeats who introduced him to the British poet and critic Arthur Symons. In the same year, Joyce registered to study medicine at the Royal University but decided to leave Dublin and start medical school in Paris instead. Joyce's Parisian days were largely spent reading philosophy or literature, rather than learning about medicine. Whilst back in Dublin for Christmas, Joyce met Oliver St John Gogarty, a fellow medical student and poet who was to be reimagined as Buck Mulligan in Ulysses (1922). Joyce returned to Paris in January but soon gave up his course. In 1903, Joyce came back to Dublin to be with his ailing mother who died on 13 August.
Early Works and Family
1904 was a significant year for Joyce. He began work on his short story collection Dubliners (1914) and Stephen Hero (a semi-biographical novel), wrote his first poetry collection Chamber Music (1907) , and wrote an essay entitled 'A Portrait of the Artist' which would later be transformed into a novel entitled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Shortly after leaving the family home, Joyce met Nora Barnacle, a charming chambermaid hailing from Galway. Joyce and Nora first went out together on 16 June 1904, the date on which Ulysses is set. Four months later, the couple left Dublin for continental Europe. They arrived in Zurich but soon moved to Pola as Joyce secured a job teaching English with the Berlitz School.
In 1905, Joyce transferred to the Berlitz School in Trieste. Except for six months in Rome, attempting to become a banker, Joyce stayed in Trieste for the next eleven years. On 27 July 1905, Joyce's son, Giorgio, was born. He was followed by Joyce's daughter, Lucia, who was born on 26 July 1907. Around the time of Lucia's birth, Joyce was hospitalised with rheumatic fever and began to experience the eye troubles which would plague him throughout his life. Despite his below-par health and lack of money, Joyce managed to avail himself of Trieste's cultural delights; drinking, dining, more drinking, theatre, popular opera, dances, concerts, and films. He also took singing lessons; Joyce's teacher, Francesco Ricardo Sinico, 'praised his voice but told him he would need two years to train it properly'.[3] Unfortunately, Joyce did not have the funds to continue with his lessons for the suggested length of time. Nonetheless, Joyce's singing teacher clearly made an impression on him as he used his name for Captain and Emily Sinico in his Dubliners story 'A Painful Case'.
In 1909, Joyce befriended Ettore Schmitz (Italian author 'Italo Svevo') who praised Joyce's unfinished manuscripts for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and persuaded him to finish the novel. Whilst back in Dublin for talks with publishers, Joyce bumped into an old acquaintance, Vincent Cosgrave, who claimed that Nora had enjoyed relations with him whilst committed to Joyce. Joyce's conflicted emotions regarding this claim can be traced in his letters to Nora.[4] Joyce eventually reconciled his differences with Nora and returned to Trieste in October 1909. In December of the same year, Joyce went back to Dublin to open one of the city's first permanent cinemas – The Volta. This was a short-lived business venture; the cinema closed down in April 1910.[5]
Struggle and Success
From 1910 to 1913, Joyce was mainly engaged in revising A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and battling to get Dubliners published. To earn money, Joyce lectured at the Università; his series of Hamlet lectures could well have been an inspiration for Stephen's Hamlet theory in the 'Scylla and Charybdis' episode of Ulysses. In 1914, thanks to the enthusiasm of fellow Modernist Ezra Pound, Dubliners was serialised in the Egoist, a literary journal. Later that year, Dubliners was finally published as a novel by Grant Richards. Whilst other young men were going off to fight in the First World War, Joyce began a prolific writing period; in the final months of 1914, Joyce wrote Giacomo Joyce (a semi-autobiographical multilingual novelette which Joyce never attempted to publish), drafted Exiles (Joyce's only play), and began writing Ulysses (Joyce's famous modern epic).[6]
In 1915, Joyce, Nora, Giorgio, and Lucia, left Trieste for neutral Zurich. Stanislaus, Joyce's brother who had also been living in Trieste, failed to escape; he was placed in an Austrian detention centre until the end of the war. For the next few years, aided by grants from the Royal Literary Fund and the British Civil List (secured by Yeats and Pound), Joyce continued to write steadily. Joyce finished Exiles in May 1915 and, despite undergoing his first eye operation in August 1917, Ulysses continued to progress.
Controversy and Final Works
In 1918, Exiles was published by Grant Richards, and in 1919 it was performed in Munich. From March 1918 to September 1920, Ulysses(still unfinished) was serialised in the Little Review, another literary magazine. However, not many subscribers were able to read certain episodes ('Laestrygonians', 'Scylla and Charybdis', 'Cyclops', and 'Nausicaa') as the magazines were confiscated and burned by the US Postal Authorities. The Egoist successfully published and distributed edited (less obscene) versions of several Ulysses episodes. In 1921, the Little Review was convicted of publishing obscenities and ceased publication. Joyce, now living in Paris (the whole family moved in October 1920), befriended Sylvia Beach who offered to publish Ulysses – in its entirety – under the imprint of her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Joyce agreed to Beach's offer; after many revisions before and during the proof stages, the first copies of Ulysses were published on Joyce's fortieth birthday – 2/2/1922.[7]
In 1923, Joyce began writing Work in Progress which would later become his experimental masterpiece, Finnegans Wake (1939). The following year, the first fragments of Work in Progress were published in Transatlantic Review, with further instalments being published in transition in 1927. 1927 also saw the publication of Joyce's second poetry collection, Pomes Penyeach, published by Shakespeare and Company. In 1928 Anna Livia Plurabelle (an early, shorter version of Finnegans Wake) was published in New York. Joyce was also recorded reading Anna Livia Plurabelle aloud; he played this recording to the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein when they met the following year.[8]
1929 and 1931 saw French translations of Ulysses and Anna Livia Plurabelle respectively. In 1930, despite undergoing a series of further eye operations, Joyce finished and published Haveth Childers Everywhere, a sequel to Anna Livia Plurabelle and another step towards Finnegans Wake. On 4 July 1931, Joyce and Nora were officially married, in London. In December of the same year, Joyce's father passed away. In 1932 (15 February), Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, was born to Giorgio and his wife Helen. Meanwhile, Lucia's mental health deteriorated; she was seen by a clinic in 1932, hospitalised in 1933, and treated by analytical psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1934.
In 1933, Ulysses faced an obscenity trial in America. After deliberation, Judge John M. Woolsey declared that the book was not obscene so could be legally published in the USA. This decision prompted the publication of several versions of Ulysses over the next couple of years, including the Random House edition (1934), the Limited Editions Club edition with illustrations by Henri Matisse (1935), and the Bodley Head edition (1936). In 1938, Joyce finished Finnegans Wake; the following year it was published simultaneously in London and New York. In September 1939, World War Two broke out and the Joyce family moved back to neutral Zurich. On 13 January 1941 Joyce died, following surgery on a perforated ulcer. He was buried in Fluntern cemetery, Zurich, foregoing Catholic last rites. Nora died ten years later and was buried separately in Fluntern. Both bodies were reburied together in 1966.
To see the work of Ezra Pound, contemporary champion of Joyce's fiction, visit the Pound section of the website.
References
• [1] Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 48.
• [2] Jeri Johnson, ‘A Chronology of James Joyce’, in James Joyce, Ulysses, (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. lxiii-lxix (p. lxiv).
• [3] John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920, (Dublin, The Lilliput Press, 2001), pp. 74-5.
• [4] Richard Ellmann (ed.), Selected Letters of James Joyce(London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 156-196.
• [5] For more information on Joyce's cinema, see John McCourt (ed.), Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010) – especially chapters one and two. Also see my 3-minute lecture on Joyce and cinema.
• [6] For an in-depth look at this prolific writing period, see John McCourt, The Years of Bloom, pp. 191-253.
• [7] For a detailed account of the composition of Ulysses, see Luca Crispi, 'Manuscript Timeline 1905-1922', Genetic Joyce Studies, 4 (2004), freely available online at:http://www.geneticjoycestudies.org/GJS4/GJS4%20Crispi.htm.
• [8] For more information of Joyce’s meeting with Eisenstein, see Gösta Werner, ‘James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein’, James Joyce Quarterly, 27:3 (1990), 491-507.
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The World of James Joyce: His Life & Work documentary (1986)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IwrHkNUk24&t=894s
Images:
1. James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in 1929
2. James Joyce 'Men are governed by lines of intellect – women by curves of emotion.
3. Sylvia Beach meets James Joyce in her Parisian English language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, in 1922.
4. Statue of Joyce in Trieste (Italy) by S.Wetzel
Background from {[http://writersinspire.org/content/james-joyce-biography]}
by Cleo Hanaway
James Augustine Joyce, the eldest surviving son of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane ('May') Joyce, was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882. He attended Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boys' school in County Kildare, until his father lost his job as a Rates Collector in 1891. Around the same time, Joyce took 'Aloysius' as his confirmation name. After a brief spell at the Christian Brothers School, all of the Joyce brothers entered Belvedere College, a Jesuit boys' day school; fortunately, the school fees were waived.
In 1894, with the Joyces' finances dwindling further, the family moved house for the fourth time since Joyce's birth. They also sold off their last remaining Cork property. Despite increasing poverty and upheaval, Joyce managed to win a prize for his excellent exam results and wrote an essay on Ulysses which, arguably, sowed the seeds for Joyce's 1922 masterpiece of the same name. In 1896 Joyce was made prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a devotional society. However, he was not as pure as he seemed; Joyce claimed to have begun his ‘sexual life’ later that year, at the age of fourteen.[1]
Education
In 1898, Joyce began studying modern languages at the Royal University (now University College, Dublin). During his time at university Joyce published several papers on literature, history, and politics. He also enjoyed visits to the music hall.[2] Joyce became particularly interested in the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and Irish writer W. B. Yeats. In 1902, on a visit to London, Joyce met Yeats who introduced him to the British poet and critic Arthur Symons. In the same year, Joyce registered to study medicine at the Royal University but decided to leave Dublin and start medical school in Paris instead. Joyce's Parisian days were largely spent reading philosophy or literature, rather than learning about medicine. Whilst back in Dublin for Christmas, Joyce met Oliver St John Gogarty, a fellow medical student and poet who was to be reimagined as Buck Mulligan in Ulysses (1922). Joyce returned to Paris in January but soon gave up his course. In 1903, Joyce came back to Dublin to be with his ailing mother who died on 13 August.
Early Works and Family
1904 was a significant year for Joyce. He began work on his short story collection Dubliners (1914) and Stephen Hero (a semi-biographical novel), wrote his first poetry collection Chamber Music (1907) , and wrote an essay entitled 'A Portrait of the Artist' which would later be transformed into a novel entitled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Shortly after leaving the family home, Joyce met Nora Barnacle, a charming chambermaid hailing from Galway. Joyce and Nora first went out together on 16 June 1904, the date on which Ulysses is set. Four months later, the couple left Dublin for continental Europe. They arrived in Zurich but soon moved to Pola as Joyce secured a job teaching English with the Berlitz School.
In 1905, Joyce transferred to the Berlitz School in Trieste. Except for six months in Rome, attempting to become a banker, Joyce stayed in Trieste for the next eleven years. On 27 July 1905, Joyce's son, Giorgio, was born. He was followed by Joyce's daughter, Lucia, who was born on 26 July 1907. Around the time of Lucia's birth, Joyce was hospitalised with rheumatic fever and began to experience the eye troubles which would plague him throughout his life. Despite his below-par health and lack of money, Joyce managed to avail himself of Trieste's cultural delights; drinking, dining, more drinking, theatre, popular opera, dances, concerts, and films. He also took singing lessons; Joyce's teacher, Francesco Ricardo Sinico, 'praised his voice but told him he would need two years to train it properly'.[3] Unfortunately, Joyce did not have the funds to continue with his lessons for the suggested length of time. Nonetheless, Joyce's singing teacher clearly made an impression on him as he used his name for Captain and Emily Sinico in his Dubliners story 'A Painful Case'.
In 1909, Joyce befriended Ettore Schmitz (Italian author 'Italo Svevo') who praised Joyce's unfinished manuscripts for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and persuaded him to finish the novel. Whilst back in Dublin for talks with publishers, Joyce bumped into an old acquaintance, Vincent Cosgrave, who claimed that Nora had enjoyed relations with him whilst committed to Joyce. Joyce's conflicted emotions regarding this claim can be traced in his letters to Nora.[4] Joyce eventually reconciled his differences with Nora and returned to Trieste in October 1909. In December of the same year, Joyce went back to Dublin to open one of the city's first permanent cinemas – The Volta. This was a short-lived business venture; the cinema closed down in April 1910.[5]
Struggle and Success
From 1910 to 1913, Joyce was mainly engaged in revising A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and battling to get Dubliners published. To earn money, Joyce lectured at the Università; his series of Hamlet lectures could well have been an inspiration for Stephen's Hamlet theory in the 'Scylla and Charybdis' episode of Ulysses. In 1914, thanks to the enthusiasm of fellow Modernist Ezra Pound, Dubliners was serialised in the Egoist, a literary journal. Later that year, Dubliners was finally published as a novel by Grant Richards. Whilst other young men were going off to fight in the First World War, Joyce began a prolific writing period; in the final months of 1914, Joyce wrote Giacomo Joyce (a semi-autobiographical multilingual novelette which Joyce never attempted to publish), drafted Exiles (Joyce's only play), and began writing Ulysses (Joyce's famous modern epic).[6]
In 1915, Joyce, Nora, Giorgio, and Lucia, left Trieste for neutral Zurich. Stanislaus, Joyce's brother who had also been living in Trieste, failed to escape; he was placed in an Austrian detention centre until the end of the war. For the next few years, aided by grants from the Royal Literary Fund and the British Civil List (secured by Yeats and Pound), Joyce continued to write steadily. Joyce finished Exiles in May 1915 and, despite undergoing his first eye operation in August 1917, Ulysses continued to progress.
Controversy and Final Works
In 1918, Exiles was published by Grant Richards, and in 1919 it was performed in Munich. From March 1918 to September 1920, Ulysses(still unfinished) was serialised in the Little Review, another literary magazine. However, not many subscribers were able to read certain episodes ('Laestrygonians', 'Scylla and Charybdis', 'Cyclops', and 'Nausicaa') as the magazines were confiscated and burned by the US Postal Authorities. The Egoist successfully published and distributed edited (less obscene) versions of several Ulysses episodes. In 1921, the Little Review was convicted of publishing obscenities and ceased publication. Joyce, now living in Paris (the whole family moved in October 1920), befriended Sylvia Beach who offered to publish Ulysses – in its entirety – under the imprint of her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Joyce agreed to Beach's offer; after many revisions before and during the proof stages, the first copies of Ulysses were published on Joyce's fortieth birthday – 2/2/1922.[7]
In 1923, Joyce began writing Work in Progress which would later become his experimental masterpiece, Finnegans Wake (1939). The following year, the first fragments of Work in Progress were published in Transatlantic Review, with further instalments being published in transition in 1927. 1927 also saw the publication of Joyce's second poetry collection, Pomes Penyeach, published by Shakespeare and Company. In 1928 Anna Livia Plurabelle (an early, shorter version of Finnegans Wake) was published in New York. Joyce was also recorded reading Anna Livia Plurabelle aloud; he played this recording to the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein when they met the following year.[8]
1929 and 1931 saw French translations of Ulysses and Anna Livia Plurabelle respectively. In 1930, despite undergoing a series of further eye operations, Joyce finished and published Haveth Childers Everywhere, a sequel to Anna Livia Plurabelle and another step towards Finnegans Wake. On 4 July 1931, Joyce and Nora were officially married, in London. In December of the same year, Joyce's father passed away. In 1932 (15 February), Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, was born to Giorgio and his wife Helen. Meanwhile, Lucia's mental health deteriorated; she was seen by a clinic in 1932, hospitalised in 1933, and treated by analytical psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1934.
In 1933, Ulysses faced an obscenity trial in America. After deliberation, Judge John M. Woolsey declared that the book was not obscene so could be legally published in the USA. This decision prompted the publication of several versions of Ulysses over the next couple of years, including the Random House edition (1934), the Limited Editions Club edition with illustrations by Henri Matisse (1935), and the Bodley Head edition (1936). In 1938, Joyce finished Finnegans Wake; the following year it was published simultaneously in London and New York. In September 1939, World War Two broke out and the Joyce family moved back to neutral Zurich. On 13 January 1941 Joyce died, following surgery on a perforated ulcer. He was buried in Fluntern cemetery, Zurich, foregoing Catholic last rites. Nora died ten years later and was buried separately in Fluntern. Both bodies were reburied together in 1966.
To see the work of Ezra Pound, contemporary champion of Joyce's fiction, visit the Pound section of the website.
References
• [1] Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 48.
• [2] Jeri Johnson, ‘A Chronology of James Joyce’, in James Joyce, Ulysses, (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. lxiii-lxix (p. lxiv).
• [3] John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920, (Dublin, The Lilliput Press, 2001), pp. 74-5.
• [4] Richard Ellmann (ed.), Selected Letters of James Joyce(London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 156-196.
• [5] For more information on Joyce's cinema, see John McCourt (ed.), Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010) – especially chapters one and two. Also see my 3-minute lecture on Joyce and cinema.
• [6] For an in-depth look at this prolific writing period, see John McCourt, The Years of Bloom, pp. 191-253.
• [7] For a detailed account of the composition of Ulysses, see Luca Crispi, 'Manuscript Timeline 1905-1922', Genetic Joyce Studies, 4 (2004), freely available online at:http://www.geneticjoycestudies.org/GJS4/GJS4%20Crispi.htm.
• [8] For more information of Joyce’s meeting with Eisenstein, see Gösta Werner, ‘James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein’, James Joyce Quarterly, 27:3 (1990), 491-507.
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LTC Stephen F.
James Joyce: Ireland's Most Enigmatic Writer
Get started with Babbel today: http://bit.ly/BabbelBiographics Subscribe for new videos four times per week.https://www.youtube.com/c/biographics?sub_confir...
James Joyce: Ireland's Most Enigmatic Writer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVa2j_RCjiY
Images:
1. James Joyce with his grandson Stephen in 1934.
2. James Joyce 'Life is too short to read a bad book'.
3. James Joyce 'Absence is the highest form of presence.
Background from {[https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/d/dubliners/critical-essays/themes-in-dubliners]}
James Joyce Biography
Early Years and Education
James Augustine Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. At the age of six and a half, he was enrolled at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit School for Boys in Ireland's County Kildare. Eventually his family withdrew him from Clongowes, lacking the tuition. From 1893 to 1898 Joyce studied at Belvedere College, another private boys' school, and in 1898 he enrolled at University College, Dublin. He graduated in 1902 with a degree in modern languages. During 1903 he studied medicine in Paris and published reviews; receiving a telegram saying that his mother was deathly ill, he returned to Dublin in time for her death. The following year he met Nora Barnacle, a country girl from the west of Ireland who would become his lifelong companion; their first date took place on June 16, 1904: the day on which Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, would be set.
Literary Writing
Also in 1904, while teaching school in Ireland, Joyce published stories in The Irish Homestead and began a novel, Stephen Hero, that would eventually metamorphose into A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Though unmarried to Nora Barnacle, he left Ireland with her and they traveled together to Europe, where he taught languages in the Berlitz School in Yugoslavia and then in Trieste, Italy, where their son Giorgio was born. In 1906 Joyce, Nora, and Giorgio moved to Rome, where he worked in a bank, and the following year his collected poems, called Chamber Music, were published in London. Also during this time, his daughter Lucia was born.
In 1909 Joyce visited Ireland, where he opened a movie theater in Dublin with the help of some European investors; he also signed a contract for the publication of Dubliners. In 1912 he visited Ireland again, this time with his family; the book would not be published until two years later, in London. Also in 1914, Joyce's first completed novel, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, was serialized in the London magazine The Egoist. He began writing Ulysses at this time.
The Joyces moved in 1915 to Switzerland. The following year, A Portrait was published in New York. In 1918, his poorly received play, Exiles, was published in London. It was also that year that chapters from Ulysses, his novel-in-progress, began to appear in the American journal The Little Review. Publication of the completed book would not occur until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the already famous new book.
The writer's Pomes Pennyeach was published in 1927; four years later, Joyce and Nora were married in London, already having lived together for over a quarter of a century. In 1933, a New York judge ruled that Ulysses was not pornographic; until that time, it had been banned in the United States as obscene. A year later, Random House published the novel, and five years after that, in 1939, Finnegans Wake appeared.
Joyce died at the age of 59 on January 13, 1941, in Zurich, where he was buried.
Honors and Awards
Though easily one of the most innovative and influential writers of the twentieth century, James Joyce was little rewarded during his lifetime for his achievements in literature. Upon the appearance of his first published stories, he received the kudos of his literary peers, giants like W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. With the publication of Ulysses in Paris — and its subsequent banning in the United States and other countries — he achieved worldwide fame and notoriety, appearing, for instance, on the cover of Time magazine. Formal recognition, in the form of honors and awards, was scant, however. Amazingly, he never received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Money was rarely forthcoming.
Unlike most other authors, whose status ebbs and flows, Joyce has never gone out of fashion. (In that way he is like his heroes, Shakespeare and Ibsen.) Stylistically, his influence can be seen in the work of literary giants who followed him, ranging from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner to Ralph Ellison and Henry Roth. To many writers, scholars, and general readers, he is the very embodiment of the Modern in literature.
James Joyce continues to influence all writers at every level who strive to write about the ordinary, to tell the story of the little guy (or gal). In 1999 a panel convened by the Modern Library named Ulysses the most notable novel of the century, with A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man coming in third.
Critical Essays Themes in Dubliners
Even before its London publication in 1914, James Joyce's Dubliners caused considerable controversy due to the material in the stories that was obvious and accessible, available to even the most casual readers and reviewers. The collection all but overflows with unattractive human behavior: simony, truancy, pederasty, drunkenness (all of them in the first three stories alone!), child and spousal abuse, gambling, prostitution, petty thievery, blackmail, and suicide. The use throughout of the names of Dublin streets and parks — and especially shops, pubs, and railway companies — was seen as scandalous, too. (In the past, fiction writers had almost invariably changed the names of their short-story and novel settings, or discretely left them out altogether.) In fact, including these details delayed publication of the book by years, as potential publishers and printers feared lawsuits by those businesses mentioned by name. Disrespectful dialogue about the king of England, and even the use of the mild British oath "bloody," were thought by many to go beyond the bounds of good taste — and they did. In contrast to his status-conscious character Gabriel Conroy, James Joyce rejected good taste — one of the characteristics that mark his art as Modern.
A precedent existed for Joyce's warts-and-all approach, in the nineteenth-century French school of writing known as Naturalism, but no writer had ever been quite as explicit, or as relentlessly downbeat, as Joyce in Dubliners. To this day, despite a more liberal attitude in art and entertainment regarding the issues dramatized in the book (premarital sex, for instance, is hardly the taboo it was when "The Boarding House" appeared), many first-time readers are distracted by the unsavory surface details of nearly all the stories. This distraction can prevent them from appreciating Dubliners' deeper, more universal themes. It can be difficult to see the forest in this book for the blighted, stunted, gnarled trees. Of course, the forest is no fairyland, either. For Joyce's three major themes in Dubliners are paralysis, corruption, and death. All appear in the collection's very first story, "The Sisters" — and all continue to appear throughout the book, up to and including the magnificent final tale, "The Dead."
James Joyce himself wrote, "I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that . . . paralysis which many consider a city." Joyce believed passionately that Irish society and culture had been frozen in place for centuries by two forces: the Roman Catholic Church and England. The result, at the turn of the twentieth century, was one of the poorest, least-developed countries in all of Western Europe. And so images of paralysis recur throughout the collection obsessively, relentlessly, and without mercy. In the first line of "Sisters," and thus the first of Dubliners as a whole, it is revealed that Father Flynn has suffered a third and fatal stroke. Later, the unnamed protagonist of the story dreams of a gray face that "had died of paralysis," which is that of Father Flynn himself. This sets the tone for much of the material to follow.
The main character of "An Encounter" wants "real adventures," but is waylaid on his quest for the Pigeon House by a stranger who masturbates — a kind of paralysis because it is sex that does not result in procreation or even love. The Pigeon House itself is symbolic: A pigeon is a bird trained always to return home, no matter how far it flies. In "Araby," although the boy ultimately reaches the bazaar, he arrives too late to buy Mangan's sister a decent gift there. Why? Because his uncle, who holds the money that will make the excursion possible, has been out drinking. Drunkenness paralyzes too, of course. Eveline, in the story that bears her name, freezes at the gangplank leading to the ship that would take her away from her dead-end Dublin life. All three characters venture tentatively outward, only to be forced by fear or circumstance — by Ireland itself, Joyce would say — to return where they came from, literally or metaphorically empty handed. Indeed, characters in Dubliners are forever returning home, bereft: Think of the protagonists of "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," and "Clay." The bereft Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead" never makes it home at all.
Yellow and brown are the colors symbolic of paralysis throughout the work of James Joyce. Note, for instance, that the old men in Dubliners' first two stories show yellow teeth when they smile. Joyce's other image of paralysis is the circle. The race cars in "After the Race" conjure images of circular or oval tracks on which starting and finish lines are one and the same, and indeed, the story's protagonist seems stuck in a pointless circuit of expensive schools and false friendships. In "Two Gallants" and "The Dead," characters travel around and around, never moving truly forward, never actually arriving anywhere. Lenehan in "Two Gallants" travels in a large and meaningless loop around Dublin, stopping only for a paltry meal and ending near to where he began. He is an observer, not an actor — and an observer of a petty crime, at that. In one of the most memorable images in the entire book, Gabriel's grandfather in "The Dead" is said to have owned a horse named Johnny who earned his keep at the family glue factory "walking round and round in order to drive the mill." One day, according to family legend, the "old gentleman" harnessed Johnny to a carriage and led him out into the city. Upon reaching a famous statue of King William, however, the horse could not be made to proceed onward, instead plodding dumbly in an endless circle around the statue. Gabriel acts this out, circling the front hall of the Morkans' house in his galoshes, to the delight of all. Conventionally, the circle is a symbol of life with positive connotations, as in wedding rings and Christmas wreaths. In Dubliners, however, it means an insuperable lack of progress, growth, and development. It means paralysis.
Joyce's second great theme here is corruption; that is, contamination, deterioration, perversity, or depravity. Because corruption prevents progress, it is closely related to the theme of paralysis — and indeed, corruption is almost as prevalent in Dubliners as paralysis. Again, Joyce introduces his theme at once. In the second paragraph of "The Sisters," the unnamed narrator mentions simony (the selling to its members by the Roman Catholic Church of blessings, pardons, or other favors), of which Father Flynn has apparently been guilty. The two stories that follow reiterate the theme. Certainly, perversity and depravity exist in "An Encounter," just as the narrator's unarguably pure love for Mangan's sister in "Araby" is contaminated — and effectively paralyzed — by his uncle's drunkenness. In fact, a subtheme of Dubliners' first three stories, as well as "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," and "A Mother" is the corruption of childhood innocence — seen in the former stories from the child's point of view, and in the latter from the perspective of the corrupting adults.
Corruption returns in various guises throughout the book. In "The Boarding House," Mrs. Mooney hopes to earn money from the young woman living under her roof, and thus gives Polly "the run of the young men" there. In "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," the canvassers work for money, rather than out of enthusiasm on behalf of the candidate they support, and some of them in fact seem contemptuous of that candidate. "A Mother" returns to the theme of corruption, as the concerts staged by Holohan are patriotic in nature (a celebration of Irish culture), and yet Mrs. Kearney's only concern is the money promised to her daughter. Finally, in "Grace," the purity of Christian faith in God clearly has been corrupted by the institution of the Catholic Church — then further corrupted by types like Kernan's friends, who seem to mean well but misunderstand almost everything about their own faith. By discouraging him from drinking, Kernan's friends have probably saved his life, but they have done so by means of a sort of parody of real religion.
Joyce's third and last major theme in Dubliners is death. He links this theme closely to the prior two, and without much effort, as paralysis often precedes death, and corruption could be defined as resulting from a kind of spiritual or moral death. Once more, Joyce introduces his theme from the get-go: The events of "The Sisters" are caused by the death of Father Flynn, whose corpse the story's boy protagonist eventually sees face to face. Deaths are also implied in this story, and in "Araby" — those of the boys' parents, absent from both tales. Thereafter, death follows death in Dubliners: Dead is the priest who last lived in the house in "Araby"; Eveline's mother in "Eveline"; Mrs. Mooney's father in "The Boarding House"; Maria, perhaps, in "Clay" (the title of which symbolizes death itself); Mrs. Sinico (by suicide) in "A Painful Case"; Charles Parnell in "Ivy Day"; and finally Michael Furey and the other inhabitants of the churchyard in which he lays buried in "The Dead." Those are only the actual deaths in the book; add spiritual and moral deaths, and Dubliners grows as crowded with corpses as the Hades episode in Homer's Odyssey.
Paralysis, corruption, and death: In Dubliners, Joyce paints a grim picture of his hometown and its inhabitants. Keep in mind that he blamed the sorry state of affairs on outside forces — England and the church — rather than the Irish themselves. Looking back, the writer himself found the book insufficiently sympathetic to Dubliners' best qualities (hospitality, for example). He would address this deficiency in his masterpiece, Ulysses, which itself began as an aborted Dubliners story. Before that, however, he would tell the tale of a Dublin youth who vows to escape the paralysis, corruption, and death endemic to Dublin, a character based on Joyce himself whom he called Stephen Dedalus. Dedalus would be the main character of Joyce's thematically similar next book and his first novel: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVa2j_RCjiY
Images:
1. James Joyce with his grandson Stephen in 1934.
2. James Joyce 'Life is too short to read a bad book'.
3. James Joyce 'Absence is the highest form of presence.
Background from {[https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/d/dubliners/critical-essays/themes-in-dubliners]}
James Joyce Biography
Early Years and Education
James Augustine Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. At the age of six and a half, he was enrolled at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit School for Boys in Ireland's County Kildare. Eventually his family withdrew him from Clongowes, lacking the tuition. From 1893 to 1898 Joyce studied at Belvedere College, another private boys' school, and in 1898 he enrolled at University College, Dublin. He graduated in 1902 with a degree in modern languages. During 1903 he studied medicine in Paris and published reviews; receiving a telegram saying that his mother was deathly ill, he returned to Dublin in time for her death. The following year he met Nora Barnacle, a country girl from the west of Ireland who would become his lifelong companion; their first date took place on June 16, 1904: the day on which Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, would be set.
Literary Writing
Also in 1904, while teaching school in Ireland, Joyce published stories in The Irish Homestead and began a novel, Stephen Hero, that would eventually metamorphose into A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Though unmarried to Nora Barnacle, he left Ireland with her and they traveled together to Europe, where he taught languages in the Berlitz School in Yugoslavia and then in Trieste, Italy, where their son Giorgio was born. In 1906 Joyce, Nora, and Giorgio moved to Rome, where he worked in a bank, and the following year his collected poems, called Chamber Music, were published in London. Also during this time, his daughter Lucia was born.
In 1909 Joyce visited Ireland, where he opened a movie theater in Dublin with the help of some European investors; he also signed a contract for the publication of Dubliners. In 1912 he visited Ireland again, this time with his family; the book would not be published until two years later, in London. Also in 1914, Joyce's first completed novel, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, was serialized in the London magazine The Egoist. He began writing Ulysses at this time.
The Joyces moved in 1915 to Switzerland. The following year, A Portrait was published in New York. In 1918, his poorly received play, Exiles, was published in London. It was also that year that chapters from Ulysses, his novel-in-progress, began to appear in the American journal The Little Review. Publication of the completed book would not occur until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the already famous new book.
The writer's Pomes Pennyeach was published in 1927; four years later, Joyce and Nora were married in London, already having lived together for over a quarter of a century. In 1933, a New York judge ruled that Ulysses was not pornographic; until that time, it had been banned in the United States as obscene. A year later, Random House published the novel, and five years after that, in 1939, Finnegans Wake appeared.
Joyce died at the age of 59 on January 13, 1941, in Zurich, where he was buried.
Honors and Awards
Though easily one of the most innovative and influential writers of the twentieth century, James Joyce was little rewarded during his lifetime for his achievements in literature. Upon the appearance of his first published stories, he received the kudos of his literary peers, giants like W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. With the publication of Ulysses in Paris — and its subsequent banning in the United States and other countries — he achieved worldwide fame and notoriety, appearing, for instance, on the cover of Time magazine. Formal recognition, in the form of honors and awards, was scant, however. Amazingly, he never received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Money was rarely forthcoming.
Unlike most other authors, whose status ebbs and flows, Joyce has never gone out of fashion. (In that way he is like his heroes, Shakespeare and Ibsen.) Stylistically, his influence can be seen in the work of literary giants who followed him, ranging from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner to Ralph Ellison and Henry Roth. To many writers, scholars, and general readers, he is the very embodiment of the Modern in literature.
James Joyce continues to influence all writers at every level who strive to write about the ordinary, to tell the story of the little guy (or gal). In 1999 a panel convened by the Modern Library named Ulysses the most notable novel of the century, with A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man coming in third.
Critical Essays Themes in Dubliners
Even before its London publication in 1914, James Joyce's Dubliners caused considerable controversy due to the material in the stories that was obvious and accessible, available to even the most casual readers and reviewers. The collection all but overflows with unattractive human behavior: simony, truancy, pederasty, drunkenness (all of them in the first three stories alone!), child and spousal abuse, gambling, prostitution, petty thievery, blackmail, and suicide. The use throughout of the names of Dublin streets and parks — and especially shops, pubs, and railway companies — was seen as scandalous, too. (In the past, fiction writers had almost invariably changed the names of their short-story and novel settings, or discretely left them out altogether.) In fact, including these details delayed publication of the book by years, as potential publishers and printers feared lawsuits by those businesses mentioned by name. Disrespectful dialogue about the king of England, and even the use of the mild British oath "bloody," were thought by many to go beyond the bounds of good taste — and they did. In contrast to his status-conscious character Gabriel Conroy, James Joyce rejected good taste — one of the characteristics that mark his art as Modern.
A precedent existed for Joyce's warts-and-all approach, in the nineteenth-century French school of writing known as Naturalism, but no writer had ever been quite as explicit, or as relentlessly downbeat, as Joyce in Dubliners. To this day, despite a more liberal attitude in art and entertainment regarding the issues dramatized in the book (premarital sex, for instance, is hardly the taboo it was when "The Boarding House" appeared), many first-time readers are distracted by the unsavory surface details of nearly all the stories. This distraction can prevent them from appreciating Dubliners' deeper, more universal themes. It can be difficult to see the forest in this book for the blighted, stunted, gnarled trees. Of course, the forest is no fairyland, either. For Joyce's three major themes in Dubliners are paralysis, corruption, and death. All appear in the collection's very first story, "The Sisters" — and all continue to appear throughout the book, up to and including the magnificent final tale, "The Dead."
James Joyce himself wrote, "I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that . . . paralysis which many consider a city." Joyce believed passionately that Irish society and culture had been frozen in place for centuries by two forces: the Roman Catholic Church and England. The result, at the turn of the twentieth century, was one of the poorest, least-developed countries in all of Western Europe. And so images of paralysis recur throughout the collection obsessively, relentlessly, and without mercy. In the first line of "Sisters," and thus the first of Dubliners as a whole, it is revealed that Father Flynn has suffered a third and fatal stroke. Later, the unnamed protagonist of the story dreams of a gray face that "had died of paralysis," which is that of Father Flynn himself. This sets the tone for much of the material to follow.
The main character of "An Encounter" wants "real adventures," but is waylaid on his quest for the Pigeon House by a stranger who masturbates — a kind of paralysis because it is sex that does not result in procreation or even love. The Pigeon House itself is symbolic: A pigeon is a bird trained always to return home, no matter how far it flies. In "Araby," although the boy ultimately reaches the bazaar, he arrives too late to buy Mangan's sister a decent gift there. Why? Because his uncle, who holds the money that will make the excursion possible, has been out drinking. Drunkenness paralyzes too, of course. Eveline, in the story that bears her name, freezes at the gangplank leading to the ship that would take her away from her dead-end Dublin life. All three characters venture tentatively outward, only to be forced by fear or circumstance — by Ireland itself, Joyce would say — to return where they came from, literally or metaphorically empty handed. Indeed, characters in Dubliners are forever returning home, bereft: Think of the protagonists of "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," and "Clay." The bereft Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead" never makes it home at all.
Yellow and brown are the colors symbolic of paralysis throughout the work of James Joyce. Note, for instance, that the old men in Dubliners' first two stories show yellow teeth when they smile. Joyce's other image of paralysis is the circle. The race cars in "After the Race" conjure images of circular or oval tracks on which starting and finish lines are one and the same, and indeed, the story's protagonist seems stuck in a pointless circuit of expensive schools and false friendships. In "Two Gallants" and "The Dead," characters travel around and around, never moving truly forward, never actually arriving anywhere. Lenehan in "Two Gallants" travels in a large and meaningless loop around Dublin, stopping only for a paltry meal and ending near to where he began. He is an observer, not an actor — and an observer of a petty crime, at that. In one of the most memorable images in the entire book, Gabriel's grandfather in "The Dead" is said to have owned a horse named Johnny who earned his keep at the family glue factory "walking round and round in order to drive the mill." One day, according to family legend, the "old gentleman" harnessed Johnny to a carriage and led him out into the city. Upon reaching a famous statue of King William, however, the horse could not be made to proceed onward, instead plodding dumbly in an endless circle around the statue. Gabriel acts this out, circling the front hall of the Morkans' house in his galoshes, to the delight of all. Conventionally, the circle is a symbol of life with positive connotations, as in wedding rings and Christmas wreaths. In Dubliners, however, it means an insuperable lack of progress, growth, and development. It means paralysis.
Joyce's second great theme here is corruption; that is, contamination, deterioration, perversity, or depravity. Because corruption prevents progress, it is closely related to the theme of paralysis — and indeed, corruption is almost as prevalent in Dubliners as paralysis. Again, Joyce introduces his theme at once. In the second paragraph of "The Sisters," the unnamed narrator mentions simony (the selling to its members by the Roman Catholic Church of blessings, pardons, or other favors), of which Father Flynn has apparently been guilty. The two stories that follow reiterate the theme. Certainly, perversity and depravity exist in "An Encounter," just as the narrator's unarguably pure love for Mangan's sister in "Araby" is contaminated — and effectively paralyzed — by his uncle's drunkenness. In fact, a subtheme of Dubliners' first three stories, as well as "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," and "A Mother" is the corruption of childhood innocence — seen in the former stories from the child's point of view, and in the latter from the perspective of the corrupting adults.
Corruption returns in various guises throughout the book. In "The Boarding House," Mrs. Mooney hopes to earn money from the young woman living under her roof, and thus gives Polly "the run of the young men" there. In "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," the canvassers work for money, rather than out of enthusiasm on behalf of the candidate they support, and some of them in fact seem contemptuous of that candidate. "A Mother" returns to the theme of corruption, as the concerts staged by Holohan are patriotic in nature (a celebration of Irish culture), and yet Mrs. Kearney's only concern is the money promised to her daughter. Finally, in "Grace," the purity of Christian faith in God clearly has been corrupted by the institution of the Catholic Church — then further corrupted by types like Kernan's friends, who seem to mean well but misunderstand almost everything about their own faith. By discouraging him from drinking, Kernan's friends have probably saved his life, but they have done so by means of a sort of parody of real religion.
Joyce's third and last major theme in Dubliners is death. He links this theme closely to the prior two, and without much effort, as paralysis often precedes death, and corruption could be defined as resulting from a kind of spiritual or moral death. Once more, Joyce introduces his theme from the get-go: The events of "The Sisters" are caused by the death of Father Flynn, whose corpse the story's boy protagonist eventually sees face to face. Deaths are also implied in this story, and in "Araby" — those of the boys' parents, absent from both tales. Thereafter, death follows death in Dubliners: Dead is the priest who last lived in the house in "Araby"; Eveline's mother in "Eveline"; Mrs. Mooney's father in "The Boarding House"; Maria, perhaps, in "Clay" (the title of which symbolizes death itself); Mrs. Sinico (by suicide) in "A Painful Case"; Charles Parnell in "Ivy Day"; and finally Michael Furey and the other inhabitants of the churchyard in which he lays buried in "The Dead." Those are only the actual deaths in the book; add spiritual and moral deaths, and Dubliners grows as crowded with corpses as the Hades episode in Homer's Odyssey.
Paralysis, corruption, and death: In Dubliners, Joyce paints a grim picture of his hometown and its inhabitants. Keep in mind that he blamed the sorry state of affairs on outside forces — England and the church — rather than the Irish themselves. Looking back, the writer himself found the book insufficiently sympathetic to Dubliners' best qualities (hospitality, for example). He would address this deficiency in his masterpiece, Ulysses, which itself began as an aborted Dubliners story. Before that, however, he would tell the tale of a Dublin youth who vows to escape the paralysis, corruption, and death endemic to Dublin, a character based on Joyce himself whom he called Stephen Dedalus. Dedalus would be the main character of Joyce's thematically similar next book and his first novel: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.
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Descrizione
James Joyce & The Dubliners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR2tR6IpLl4
Images:
1. James Joyce
2. James Joyce 'Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.'
3. James Joyce 'A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.'
Background from {[https://poets.org/poet/james-joyce]}
James Joyce
1882–1941
James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. He attended Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, and he received a BA from the Royal University in Dublin.
In 1904 Joyce left Dublin with Nora Barnacle; the couple had two children and eventually married in 1931. From 1904 to 1905, they lived in Pola, Austria-Hungary, where Joyce published his first literary work, the satirical poem “The Holy Office.” They went on to live in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, returning to Ireland only rarely.
Joyce published his first book of poetry, Chamber Music (Elkin Matthews), in 1907. He is also the author of the poetry collection Pomes Penyeach (Shakespeare and Company, 1927). In 1936 The Black Sun Press published Joyce’s Collected Poems, which included the poems from his previous two collections alongside the poem “Ecce Puer,” written in 1932.
A review, sometimes attributed to T. S. Eliot, of Chamber Music in The Egoist reads, “Mr. Joyce is probably something of a musician; it is lyric verse, and good lyric verse is very rare. It will be called ‘fragile,’ but it is substantial, with a great deal of thought behind fine workmanship.”
Joyce is best known for his works of fiction, including Ulysses (Shakespeare and Company, 1922), the focus of several incendiary literary controversies; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (B. W. Huebsch, 1916); and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914). He also published Exiles: A Play in Three Acts (Grant Richards, 1918). Together, his works represent a major contribution to avant-garde modernism and to twentieth-century English literature.
Joyce suffered from a series of ocular illnesses, and he spent periods of his later life partially or totally blind. He died of complications from an intestinal surgery on January 13, 1941, in Zurich, Switzerland.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Collected Poems (The Black Sun Press, 1936)
Pomes Penyeach (Shakespeare and Company, 1927)
Chamber Music (Elkin Matthews, 1907)
Prose
Finnegan’s Wake (Faber & Faber, 1939)
Ulysses (Shakespeare and Company, 1922)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (B. W. Huebsch, 1916)
Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914)
FYI LTC John Shaw SPC Diana D. LTC Hillary Luton
1SG Steven ImermanSSG Pete FishGySgt Gary CordeiroPO1 H Gene LawrenceSPC Chris Bayner-CwikSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerMSG Tom EarleySSgt Marian MitchellSGT Michael HearnPO2 Frederick DunnSP5 Dennis LobergerCPO John BjorgeSGT Randell RoseSSG Jimmy CernichSGT Denny EspinosaMSG Fred Bucci
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR2tR6IpLl4
Images:
1. James Joyce
2. James Joyce 'Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.'
3. James Joyce 'A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.'
Background from {[https://poets.org/poet/james-joyce]}
James Joyce
1882–1941
James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. He attended Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, and he received a BA from the Royal University in Dublin.
In 1904 Joyce left Dublin with Nora Barnacle; the couple had two children and eventually married in 1931. From 1904 to 1905, they lived in Pola, Austria-Hungary, where Joyce published his first literary work, the satirical poem “The Holy Office.” They went on to live in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, returning to Ireland only rarely.
Joyce published his first book of poetry, Chamber Music (Elkin Matthews), in 1907. He is also the author of the poetry collection Pomes Penyeach (Shakespeare and Company, 1927). In 1936 The Black Sun Press published Joyce’s Collected Poems, which included the poems from his previous two collections alongside the poem “Ecce Puer,” written in 1932.
A review, sometimes attributed to T. S. Eliot, of Chamber Music in The Egoist reads, “Mr. Joyce is probably something of a musician; it is lyric verse, and good lyric verse is very rare. It will be called ‘fragile,’ but it is substantial, with a great deal of thought behind fine workmanship.”
Joyce is best known for his works of fiction, including Ulysses (Shakespeare and Company, 1922), the focus of several incendiary literary controversies; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (B. W. Huebsch, 1916); and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914). He also published Exiles: A Play in Three Acts (Grant Richards, 1918). Together, his works represent a major contribution to avant-garde modernism and to twentieth-century English literature.
Joyce suffered from a series of ocular illnesses, and he spent periods of his later life partially or totally blind. He died of complications from an intestinal surgery on January 13, 1941, in Zurich, Switzerland.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Collected Poems (The Black Sun Press, 1936)
Pomes Penyeach (Shakespeare and Company, 1927)
Chamber Music (Elkin Matthews, 1907)
Prose
Finnegan’s Wake (Faber & Faber, 1939)
Ulysses (Shakespeare and Company, 1922)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (B. W. Huebsch, 1916)
Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914)
FYI LTC John Shaw SPC Diana D. LTC Hillary Luton
1SG Steven ImermanSSG Pete FishGySgt Gary CordeiroPO1 H Gene LawrenceSPC Chris Bayner-CwikSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerMSG Tom EarleySSgt Marian MitchellSGT Michael HearnPO2 Frederick DunnSP5 Dennis LobergerCPO John BjorgeSGT Randell RoseSSG Jimmy CernichSGT Denny EspinosaMSG Fred Bucci
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1SG Steven Imerman
I've read about half of Ulysses twice, but then got totally lost. The "stream of consciousness" thing is too much for this old country boy. Same with Proust, though I enjoy Faulkner's way of doing it. But, he was, if not a country boy, at least a small rural town boy, and maybe that is how I connect.
Later edit- I just remembered I enjoyed Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which was entirely stream of consciousness. Maybe Joyce and Proust's are just too long, too much effort to work through.
Later edit- I just remembered I enjoyed Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which was entirely stream of consciousness. Maybe Joyce and Proust's are just too long, too much effort to work through.
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