Joyce Biography

Joyce Biography

1. Family

   • Dublin
   • Catholic
   • Father drifted down financial and social scale

2. Catholic Education

   • Conglowes
   • Belvedere College
   • Dublin, University College

3. Rebellion

   • Religion
   • Family
   • Nationalism
   • In favor of literary mission involving rebellion and exile
     • Paris, Trieste, Zurich

4. Dublin

   • He wrote always only about Dublin
     • Topography
     • History
     • Atmosphere
   • Microcosm of human history, geography and experience

5. Works

   • Dubliners (1914)
     • Sharp and realistic sketch of the paralis of the lives of people in the then-provincial Ireland
     • Epiphanies
     • No conventional narrative closure
     • "The Dead"
       • The nature of artistic objectivity
       • A series of events free Gabriel from his possessiveness and egoism, so he can reach the mood of supremeneutrality that Joyce saw as the beginning pf artistic awareness
   • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
     • His emergence as a man dedicated to imaginative writing
     • Parallel movement toward art and exile
   • Ulysses (1922)
     • Troubles getting it printed
       • Banned in American and Britain
       • Charged with obscenity
     • Account one day in the life of Dubliners
     • Correspondence with Homer's Odissey
       • Ulyssed = the most complete man in literature
       • Leopold Bloom = modern Ulysses
       • Parallels between Homeric archetypes and modern-day characters and events create interpretative complexities (ironic/heoirc, epic /mock-epick)
   • Finnegans Wake (1939)
     • Joyce gave up realism completely
     • Invention of a drama language
       • Continual expansion of meaning
       • Puns deriving from every source in history, literature, mythology and Joyce's personal experience
     • Story of a symbolic Irishman cosmic dream