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On December 29, 1916, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" was published. From the article:
"James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1816)
Biography:
Considered by many scholars to be one of the most radical innovators of twentieth-century writing, Joyce dedicated himself to exuberant exploration of the total resources of language. Joyce was born in Dublin, where his father was a rates collector. His father, who took pride in coming of an old and substantial Cork family, had some talent as a musician and much more as a genial lounger, and was little troubled by the economic straits into which is household was drifting during his son's boyhood. Joyce was sent at first to the expensive Jesuit boarding school described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When he was still an undergraduate, in 1900, his long review of Ibsen's last play was published in the Fortnightly Review. At this time he also began writing his poems which were later collected in Chamber Music (1907).
In 1902 he broke away from his family and his studies and went to Paris on a tenuous proposal to read
medicine. After a year of near starvation he was recalled to Dublin to the deathbed of his mother. His refusal to kneel in prayer beside the dying woman, whether it be matter of fact or the artistic transmutation of fact, certainly marks that turning point in his life at which he formally renounced the Christian faith and thereby thought to free himself from influences by which (as we can now see) his mind had been irrevocably colored.
From 1904 he lived with Nora Barnacle, whom he married in 1931 (the year his father died), a son was born in 1905, and a daughter in 1918. Miss Barnacle, who is said to have worked in a Dublin hotel [as a chambermaid], had little education and no understanding of Joyce's work; to the end she seems to have felt merely that he made things very difficult for himself by writing in so strange a fashion. But she shared the fondness for music and was vivacious and humorous. Their home from 1905 to 1915 was Trieste, where Joyce taught English at the Berlitz school. In 1909 and 1912 he made his final trips to Ireland, attempting to arrange the publication of his first book Dubliners, which finally appeared in England in 1914. It was during this time that he was contacted by Ezra Pound, a leading champion of modernist writers who helped organize financial payments to keep Joyce writing during his most poverty-stricken periods.
Dubliners is a series of short, interrelated stories which deal with the lives of ordinary people, whose actions are invested with a symbolic profundity. Joyce explores what would become central themes in his work: youth, adolescence, adulthood and maturity, and how identify is affected by these different stages in life. The following year, Joyce wrote Exiles, his only play, and went into permanent exile himself. He is taken, in fact, as the quintessential exiled writer of the twentieth century, who obsessively relates to his past by distancing himself from it.
The year 1914 was an intensely productive one for Joyce; he had two books in print and began work on his greatest achievement, Ulysses. In 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared (it had been published in serial form in The Egoist from 1914 to 1915), and established Joyce's reputation as a writer of genius. It presented the world of Dublin solely through the consciousness of the narrator, and charted his growth from Catholic boyhood to an early adulthood defined by a yearning to be an artist.
Also during 1914, Joyce and his family moved to Zurich, where they lived in great poverty while he worked on Ulysses. Joyce's eyesight continue to deteriorate progressively, despite surgery. This, plus the great difficulties of printing and proofreading his often strange and fantastic writings, made him
peculiarly dependent on the assistance of devoted friends. This he abundantly received, and although his circle tended to surround his labors with pretentious and absurd exegesis, it was composed in the main of persons of generous and amiable disposition.
Ulysses began to appear in serial form in the Little Review in 1918, but was suspended in 1920 following prosecution. It eventually appeared in book form in 1922 in Paris, where Joyce and his family had settled, in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, and was followed by an English edition of 2,000 copies, also printed in Paris. The first unlimited edition followed in 1924, again in Paris, but there was no American edition until ten years later, and no British edition until 1937.
The novel traces the experiences of Mr. Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly (whose erotic reverie towards the book's close caused most of the legal difficulties) and the poet Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist during a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. As its title suggests, however, the book is an epic, loosely analogous to Homer's Odyssey, which is echoed in several episodes. Enormously long and complex, using a variety of styles-- notably the "stream-of-consciousness" method--Ulysses is considered one of the great literary achievements of the century, and has been described as the greatest novel ever written.
Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, is even more complex than Ulysses, written in a language of his his own devising, a mixture of linguistic fragments and borrowings. It was published in 1939, the year after the Joyces returned to Switzerland from France. He died in Zurich on Jan 13, 1941.
Joyce lived largely on the gifts of patrons - notably of Harriet Weaver, and no Medici could have been more munificent. For long the judgments and prejudices of society had impeded his efforts to support himself and his family as a man of letters. He rightly considered his reliance upon patronage as entirely honorable. Joyce had weathered World War I in Zurich; and he and his wife, with their son and grandson, managed to make their way to Zurich in the second year of World War II. His last published letter, dated Dec 20, 1940, thanks the mayor for the asylum granted him and exhibits the simplicity and dignity of one who knows his place in the literary history of his time. His reputation has grown immeasurably since his death, partly because of the growth in academia. As one critic noted: "James Joyce was and remains almost unique among novelists in that he published nothing but masterpieces."
--sources: Online Biographical Encyclopedia and
A. Ruch, Reader's Companion to Twentieth Century Writers, Ed. Peter Parker
Background:
Early influences on Joyce include:
Thomas Aquinus
Aristotle
Dante
Shelley
Pater
Newman
Flaubert
Ibson
D'Annuzio
Themes in Joyce's work typically include:
Irishness (with which he has a love/hate relationship)
Irish Catholicism (again love/hate)
Language (the idea of the word; language as a theoretical abstraction)
Aesthetic Imagination (idea of the poet as the "priest of the imagination")
At 19, Joyce began his first novel, Stephen Hero. It was a bildungsroman (a novel of education). He destroyed that manuscript and reworked the idea into A Portrait, which is a kunslerroman (a novel of an artist's education).
Within this novel we see three major strains developing in Joyce's work:
the preeminence of the artist (artist as priest/creator)
strong physical details, social problems, darker side of life (revelation demonstrates the courage of the artist, who remains above the negative)
the nature of language (language within literature; language within life)
In Irish traditions, a poet was someone to be feared. He had power over language, which made him almost magical. Along thse lines, notice that it is the artist who sees and records the epiphanic moment. Through this presentation he provides insights into life. It is a moment rooted in phenomenon; it is not purely intellectual.
Notice that the scenes within the novel tend to epiphanic. And that the 20+ scenes presented can be representative of the first 20 years of the artist's life.
Notice the names: "Dedalus" is a glaring exception in what seems to be a naturalistic setting. It is a name outside of English/Irish tradition. Some critics see this novel as the story of a boy in search of the meaning of his name (Stephen=St.Stephen, the Martyr; Dedalus=Daedalus from Greek mythology, Ovid's Metemorphosis).
Details are important in Joyce. For example, in the opening scene of the story we are introduced to a recurring pattern: the colors red and green. The child sees them as choices, rather than oppositions. But as he grows old they become oppositions: green=Ireland, life; red/maroon=spiritual. They function as a barometer.
Within this novel Joyce is experimenting extensively with a narrative technique known as stream-of-consciousness. Often identified with Modernism, Joyce and Virginia Woolf are two of the earliest successful practitioners. In A Portrait, the use of stream-of-consciousness creates a doubleness within the text: Stephen's consciousness and the narrative, both mixed inseparately.
Joyce also uses the character of Stephen Dedalus to voice many of his aesthetic theories."
"James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1816)
Biography:
Considered by many scholars to be one of the most radical innovators of twentieth-century writing, Joyce dedicated himself to exuberant exploration of the total resources of language. Joyce was born in Dublin, where his father was a rates collector. His father, who took pride in coming of an old and substantial Cork family, had some talent as a musician and much more as a genial lounger, and was little troubled by the economic straits into which is household was drifting during his son's boyhood. Joyce was sent at first to the expensive Jesuit boarding school described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When he was still an undergraduate, in 1900, his long review of Ibsen's last play was published in the Fortnightly Review. At this time he also began writing his poems which were later collected in Chamber Music (1907).
In 1902 he broke away from his family and his studies and went to Paris on a tenuous proposal to read
medicine. After a year of near starvation he was recalled to Dublin to the deathbed of his mother. His refusal to kneel in prayer beside the dying woman, whether it be matter of fact or the artistic transmutation of fact, certainly marks that turning point in his life at which he formally renounced the Christian faith and thereby thought to free himself from influences by which (as we can now see) his mind had been irrevocably colored.
From 1904 he lived with Nora Barnacle, whom he married in 1931 (the year his father died), a son was born in 1905, and a daughter in 1918. Miss Barnacle, who is said to have worked in a Dublin hotel [as a chambermaid], had little education and no understanding of Joyce's work; to the end she seems to have felt merely that he made things very difficult for himself by writing in so strange a fashion. But she shared the fondness for music and was vivacious and humorous. Their home from 1905 to 1915 was Trieste, where Joyce taught English at the Berlitz school. In 1909 and 1912 he made his final trips to Ireland, attempting to arrange the publication of his first book Dubliners, which finally appeared in England in 1914. It was during this time that he was contacted by Ezra Pound, a leading champion of modernist writers who helped organize financial payments to keep Joyce writing during his most poverty-stricken periods.
Dubliners is a series of short, interrelated stories which deal with the lives of ordinary people, whose actions are invested with a symbolic profundity. Joyce explores what would become central themes in his work: youth, adolescence, adulthood and maturity, and how identify is affected by these different stages in life. The following year, Joyce wrote Exiles, his only play, and went into permanent exile himself. He is taken, in fact, as the quintessential exiled writer of the twentieth century, who obsessively relates to his past by distancing himself from it.
The year 1914 was an intensely productive one for Joyce; he had two books in print and began work on his greatest achievement, Ulysses. In 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared (it had been published in serial form in The Egoist from 1914 to 1915), and established Joyce's reputation as a writer of genius. It presented the world of Dublin solely through the consciousness of the narrator, and charted his growth from Catholic boyhood to an early adulthood defined by a yearning to be an artist.
Also during 1914, Joyce and his family moved to Zurich, where they lived in great poverty while he worked on Ulysses. Joyce's eyesight continue to deteriorate progressively, despite surgery. This, plus the great difficulties of printing and proofreading his often strange and fantastic writings, made him
peculiarly dependent on the assistance of devoted friends. This he abundantly received, and although his circle tended to surround his labors with pretentious and absurd exegesis, it was composed in the main of persons of generous and amiable disposition.
Ulysses began to appear in serial form in the Little Review in 1918, but was suspended in 1920 following prosecution. It eventually appeared in book form in 1922 in Paris, where Joyce and his family had settled, in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, and was followed by an English edition of 2,000 copies, also printed in Paris. The first unlimited edition followed in 1924, again in Paris, but there was no American edition until ten years later, and no British edition until 1937.
The novel traces the experiences of Mr. Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly (whose erotic reverie towards the book's close caused most of the legal difficulties) and the poet Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist during a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. As its title suggests, however, the book is an epic, loosely analogous to Homer's Odyssey, which is echoed in several episodes. Enormously long and complex, using a variety of styles-- notably the "stream-of-consciousness" method--Ulysses is considered one of the great literary achievements of the century, and has been described as the greatest novel ever written.
Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, is even more complex than Ulysses, written in a language of his his own devising, a mixture of linguistic fragments and borrowings. It was published in 1939, the year after the Joyces returned to Switzerland from France. He died in Zurich on Jan 13, 1941.
Joyce lived largely on the gifts of patrons - notably of Harriet Weaver, and no Medici could have been more munificent. For long the judgments and prejudices of society had impeded his efforts to support himself and his family as a man of letters. He rightly considered his reliance upon patronage as entirely honorable. Joyce had weathered World War I in Zurich; and he and his wife, with their son and grandson, managed to make their way to Zurich in the second year of World War II. His last published letter, dated Dec 20, 1940, thanks the mayor for the asylum granted him and exhibits the simplicity and dignity of one who knows his place in the literary history of his time. His reputation has grown immeasurably since his death, partly because of the growth in academia. As one critic noted: "James Joyce was and remains almost unique among novelists in that he published nothing but masterpieces."
--sources: Online Biographical Encyclopedia and
A. Ruch, Reader's Companion to Twentieth Century Writers, Ed. Peter Parker
Background:
Early influences on Joyce include:
Thomas Aquinus
Aristotle
Dante
Shelley
Pater
Newman
Flaubert
Ibson
D'Annuzio
Themes in Joyce's work typically include:
Irishness (with which he has a love/hate relationship)
Irish Catholicism (again love/hate)
Language (the idea of the word; language as a theoretical abstraction)
Aesthetic Imagination (idea of the poet as the "priest of the imagination")
At 19, Joyce began his first novel, Stephen Hero. It was a bildungsroman (a novel of education). He destroyed that manuscript and reworked the idea into A Portrait, which is a kunslerroman (a novel of an artist's education).
Within this novel we see three major strains developing in Joyce's work:
the preeminence of the artist (artist as priest/creator)
strong physical details, social problems, darker side of life (revelation demonstrates the courage of the artist, who remains above the negative)
the nature of language (language within literature; language within life)
In Irish traditions, a poet was someone to be feared. He had power over language, which made him almost magical. Along thse lines, notice that it is the artist who sees and records the epiphanic moment. Through this presentation he provides insights into life. It is a moment rooted in phenomenon; it is not purely intellectual.
Notice that the scenes within the novel tend to epiphanic. And that the 20+ scenes presented can be representative of the first 20 years of the artist's life.
Notice the names: "Dedalus" is a glaring exception in what seems to be a naturalistic setting. It is a name outside of English/Irish tradition. Some critics see this novel as the story of a boy in search of the meaning of his name (Stephen=St.Stephen, the Martyr; Dedalus=Daedalus from Greek mythology, Ovid's Metemorphosis).
Details are important in Joyce. For example, in the opening scene of the story we are introduced to a recurring pattern: the colors red and green. The child sees them as choices, rather than oppositions. But as he grows old they become oppositions: green=Ireland, life; red/maroon=spiritual. They function as a barometer.
Within this novel Joyce is experimenting extensively with a narrative technique known as stream-of-consciousness. Often identified with Modernism, Joyce and Virginia Woolf are two of the earliest successful practitioners. In A Portrait, the use of stream-of-consciousness creates a doubleness within the text: Stephen's consciousness and the narrative, both mixed inseparately.
Joyce also uses the character of Stephen Dedalus to voice many of his aesthetic theories."
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