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James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941) was an expatriate Irish writer and poet, and is widely considered one of the most significant writers of the 20th century.
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1 Life
2 Quotations
2.1 from Joyce
2.2 about Joyce
3 Related topics
4 External links
Life
James Joyce was born into a well-off Catholic family in Dublin which suffered numerous setbacks and slid into poverty. He studied literature at University College Dublin, where he rejected Catholicism.
James Joyce — detail of portrait by Jacques Emile Blanche
Joyce made his first visit to Paris in 1902 to be part of the growing artist movement in Montparnasse and Montmartre at the time. He left the city in 1904 to return to Ireland as his mother was dying. He met Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid, on June 16th of the same year and later the pair went into "exile" (his only play was titled Exiles) to spend the rest of his life on the Continent. He returned to Paris in 1920 and, apart from two visits to Ireland, would remain there for the next twenty years until just before his death in 1941.
Vivid details about his life in Paris can be found in the autobiography of Sylvia Beach , an American bookseller, who was important for the literary success of Joyce as the first editor of Ulysses.
His Irish experiences are essential to his writings, and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. The early volume of short stories, Dubliners, is a penetrating analysis of the stagnation and paralysis of Dublin society. The stories incorporate epiphanies, a word used particularly by Joyce, by which he meant a sudden consciousness of the "soul" of a thing.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, largely autobiographical, shows the process of attaining maturity and self-consciousness by a young gifted man. The main character is Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's representation of himself. In this novel some glimpses of Joyce's later techniques are evident, in the use of interior monologue and in the concern with the psychic rather than external reality.
In Ulysses, Joyce employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and virtually every other literary technique to present his characters. The action of the novel, which takes place in a single day, June 16, 1904, sets the ancient myth of Ulysses, Penelope and Telemachus in modern Dublin and represents them in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, parodically contrasted with their lofty models. The book explores various areas of Dublin life, dwelling on its squalor and monotony.
Joyce's method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream associations was pushed to the limit in Finnegans Wake, which abandoned all conventions of plot and character construction, and is written in a peculiar and obscure language, based mainly on complex multi-level puns. (His approach here is similar to, but far more extensive than, that used by Lewis Carroll in "Jabberwocky".)
All three novels were named in a list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the American Modern Library. The board chose Ulysses as number one, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as number three and Finnegans Wake as number 77.
List of works:
Joyce's work has been subject to intense scrutiny by scholars of all types, and he is one of the most noted writers of the twentieth century.
Finnegans Wake is the source of the physicist's word "quark", the name of one of the main kinds of elementary particles.
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has written a book on the use of language in Ulysses, and the American philosopher Donald Davidson has written similarly on Finnegans Wake in comparison with Lewis Carroll.
Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges often drew on Joyce as well.
James Joyce died on January 13, 1941 at Zürich, Switzerland and is buried in the Fluntern Cemetery, in Zürich with his wife, Nora.
The life of Joyce is celebrated annually on June 16, Bloomsday, in Dublin and in an increasing number of cities worldwide.
Quotations
from Joyce
- "Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end." — Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- "History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." — Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses
- "They lived and laughed and loved and left." — Finnegans Wake
- The end of Molly Bloom's Soliloquy, the last words in Ulysses (and perhaps the best-known):
"yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
about Joyce
- "James Joyce — an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized." — Tom Stoppard
Related topics
External links
This article is adapted from from Wikipedia All Wikipedia article text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
Ulysses by James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce
Dubliners by James Joyce
Parenting Young Children : Systematic Training for Effective Parenting (Step) of Children Under Six (#14302) by Don Dinkmeyer Sr.
Finnegans Wake (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by James Joyce
Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford
Ulysses by James Joyce
James Joyce's Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert
The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses by Harry Blamires
Dubliners by James Joyce
James Joyce by Richard Ellmann
Ulysses (Gabler Edition) by James Joyce
Re Joyce by Anthony Burgess
A Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses: Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Case Studies in Contemporary Critic by James Joyce
The Dead (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism) by James Joyce
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