James Joyce Life and Work ( )

Modernism  Challenged traditional attitudes about God, humanity, and society.  Scientific and industrial advances caused social upheaval:  Discontinuity  Fragmentation  Alienation  Despair

Brief Bio  Declining middle-class family, more than 12 children  Reduced to poverty by his father’s drinking  Received a classical education at Jesuit school  At University College, he rejected his religion and national heritage / alienated writer  Believed typical citizens of Dublin lived lives of mediocrity, sentimentality, and self-deception  Settled in Paris (1920-death) among artists

Technique  Stream of consciousness : reveals character’s thoughts as they experience them  Ulysses was censored in the US until 1933 because of these uninhibited thoughts  Moment of Epiphany: “sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.”

His Writing  Even though he lived in Paris, his writing was always about Dublin, the “center of paralysis”  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915):  Protagonist who rejects custom and tradition  If the artists was to see clearly and report freshly what he saw, it was necessary to stand outside the commonplace responses to experience derived from family, church, or country.  Ulysses (1922)- his masterpiece – one day in the life of Irish-Jew, Leopold Bloom, who represents a microcosm of all human experience

Most Challenging Work  Finnegan’s Wake (1939): His most challenging work  Experimental – plays with language within a fluid dream world – character’s experiences evolve into expanding meanings produced through complex allusions and elaborate puns in multiple languages  Deep, lasting influence on literature

Dubliners  Joyce’s quarrel with his native city, and his homage to it  Most accessible of Joyce’s work  15 stories about characters who struggle with oppressive morality, plodding routines, somber shadows, self-conscious decency, restless desires, and frail gestures toward freedom  Made up of quiet moments that turn out to be important  Called it “a chapter of the moral history of my country”  Causes of paralysis: Catholicism, family life, economy, vulnerability to political forces