- 1882-1941
- three eras: Victorian, Early Modern, Late Modern
- Irish Catholic ~ High Modernist ~ European Exile
- An oppressed people (British colony)
- Agitation of late 1800’s
- Parnell and Home Rule
- Betrayal and disappointment
Early Years - Born into new Catholic middle class
- Family’s decline
- Jesuit education
- Education in the City of Dublin
- Vocation: from Priest to Poet
Love and Exile - Experiences Paris (1902-03)
- Death of Mother (1903)
- Meets Nora Barnacle (June 1904)
- Leaves Ireland (October 1904)
- The Continent: Trieste, Rome, Zurich, Paris
Dubliners (1914) - 15 stories, written 1903-4 (12), 1906 (2) and 1907 (“The Dead”)
- “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the center of paralysis.”
- “I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”
Joyce on Dubliners - “I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order.”
- “I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness.”
- “What’s the matter with you is that you’re afraid to live. You and people like you. This city is suffering from hemiplegia [paralysis] of the will.”
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) - Highly autobiographical (but beware!)
- A declaration of artistic independence
- Highly modernist: stream-of-consciousness, confluence of naturalism and symbolism
- Long composition: essay (“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” ~ 1904), early novel (Stephen Hero ~ 1904-06), finished novel (1907-08, 1914)
Importance of A Portrait - THE Modernist bildungsroman (novel of education) and kunstlerroman (novel of the making of an artist)
- Liberating style and themes
- The anguish and exhilaration of gaining power over language
- Develops through style as much as through plot
- The Experience of World War I (1914-1918)
- Pound’s dictum: “Make it new”
- The Great Questioners: Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud
- An era of Revolution
- Fragmentation
- Order: myth, art
Ulysses (1922) - The great modernist epic
- Mythic method: the past and the present
- Extends Joyce’s experiments with style to the extreme: style becomes the plot
- “With me, the thought is always simple”
- “I have discovered that I can do anything with language I want”
Finnegans Wake (1939) - Composed from 1922 to 1939
- “Work in Progress” (only Nora knew the title)
- An unclassifiable work: Dream? Scripture? Joke? Philosophy of language? Myth?
- The Dream of Everyman and Everywoman, in Everylanguage
Death of Joyce - A war refugee: fled Paris, arrived in Switzerland
- Illness of daughter Lucia
- Despondent over reception of Finnegans Wake
- Died on 13 January, 1941, 3 weeks after reaching Switzerland
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