Bloomsday HUM 3285: British and American Literature Spring 2011 Dr. Perdigao January 21, 2011

James Joyce ( ) Born in Dublin, eldest of ten, impoverished family living middle-class lifestyle Mother a pianist, involvement in Roman Catholic Church Educated by Jesuits, attended University College, Dublin 1902, after graduation, goes to Paris Returns home after receiving telegram stating mother’s illness; leaves with Nora Barnacle in 1904, for Pula, Trieste Never returns to Ireland after 1912 Dubliners (1914) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Exiles (1918) Ulysses (1922) Finnegans Wake (1939) After WWII, moves to Zurich, dies in 1941

Reenvisioning Ulysses ulysses-a-century-after-the-us-did-the-same/8534http:// ulysses-a-century-after-the-us-did-the-same/8534

Portrait of the Art Joyce begins writing Ulysses in 1914, finishes in 1921 Nausicaa episode controversy, The Little Review; U.S. Post Office charge, lifting ban in 1933 Thursday, June 16, 1904 Themes of rebellion and exile (2163) Writing about Dublin, becomes symbolic, representative of larger world “paralysis” in Dubliners Development of artist—Stephen Dedalus Exile of the artist—masks, impersonality, ironic detachment of modernist writers (2165) Odysseus as “most complete man in literature”: coward and hero, cautious and reckless, weak and strong, husband and philanderer, father and son, dignified and ridiculous (2165) Leopold Bloom Stephen Dedalus

Paradoxes, Futility, and Anarchy (oh my!) “paradoxes of human loneliness and sociability” (2166) Stream of consciousness technique “With its burlesque jostling of cultural structures, myths, discourses and intellectual disciplines, it reenacts in contemporary terms an ancient tale of homecoming and thereby expresses a modern sense of what the human home is: a construction within a void” (Bell 14). “Cultural periods are often characterized by dominant metaphors such as the medieval and Renaissance great chain of being, the eighteenth-century clock or machine, or the nineteenth-century organism. In the twentieth century, language itself became the pervasive metaphor. By the mid-century, even the act of conception had become a matter of genetic ‘code.’” (Bell 18) “Eliot wanted to make the novel possible again by instilling into it a stricter form. He admired Joyce’s use of Homeric myth as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’” (Trotter 74)