James Joyce

JAMES JOYCE

(1882-1941)

LIFE

He was born in Dublin . His real name was James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. He is the son of John Stanislaus Joyce. His father was talented but feckless. Joyce primary education was Catholic, first at Clongowes Wood College. It was a Jesuit boarding school. Then he went to Belvedere College which was a grammar school. He lost his Catholic faith. He went to University College in Dublin, where some people were catholic and others were protestant. He decided to live a dissolute life.

He wanted to be a writer. He refused to play any part in the nationalist. When Joyce was eighteen he read an article by Ibsen and he taught himself Dano-Norwegian to read and to write to him. He wrote and article ‘The Days of the Rabblement’ which was refused. After receiving his degree, he left Ireland. He was 20 years old.

He had a rebellious spirit and he wanted to break ties with family, religion and country because the only way to be a good artist was by separation, by detachment. He only wrote about Ireland.

He spend a couple of years living in Paris in poverty and in 1903 he had to return to Dublin because his mother was ill, in fact, she died. After several jobs, he went to Paris and there he met Nora Barnacle, who was a chamber meade. In 1904 he went to the continent to teach English at Trieste and Zurich. Nora Barnacle went with him. She had no interest in literature.

They got married when he was about to die 1931. Meanwhile, they lived together for 27 years. He was proud, obstinate and absolutely convinced of his genious. He drank and had problems with his eyes.

In 1912 he made his last trip to Ireland to find a publisher for his books. He was not very lucky with publishes because they considered him pornographical and even his books were burnt in America. In the period between wars he spent his money drinking.

OUTPUT

He is the master of English Literature. He wrote four important books. Only one book took him ten years to be written.

He wrote:

 Stephen Hero: his first attempt. It is lengthy naturalist (naturalist fashion = outer reality) novel based on his life. This one was reworked and part of it became A portrait of an artist as a young man (1916), which traces the intellectual emotional developments of a young whose name is Stephen Dedalus.

 Dubliners (1914): 15 stories: The sisters, Eveline, Araby, Grace, Clay… All stories talk about Dublin. Dublin was a paralysed society. These speak about the classes average and fall of Dublin. He offers a more realistic style. Many of the prominent figures of Dubliners will appear then in Ulysses.

 Ulysses (1922): he

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