James Joyce Collection--Biographical Sketch
James Augustus Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a borough of Dublin, Ireland, the eldest of ten children who survived infancy. In 1888 he was enrolled at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Dublin, where he stayed until 1891. Thereafter he attended Belvedere College, and then University College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1902 with a major in Italian. While at UCD Joyce wrote a paper in defense of Henrik Ibsen's drama called "Drama and Life," which was suppressed by the college president on moral grounds.
James Joyce's father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was a Cork man who had inherited enough property to ensure a comfortable living from rents, but his alcoholism led to a seemingly endless series of disasters which drove the family to abject poverty by the time young Joyce was mature. His mother, Mary Jane Murray, died of cancer soon after Joyce graduated from university; Joyce's autobiographical counterpart Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, is haunted by her memory. Young James was his father's favorite; he in turn seemed to forgive his father's weaknesses. Many of James Joyce's fictional characters and stories are indebted to his father's humorous stories of Dublin and its pubs.
After graduation Joyce went to Paris to study medicine, but he had neither the funds to matriculate nor to pay for adequate food and lodging. He made little progress in his medical studies because he used his time to read widely in literature in preparation for his serious commitment to art. He returned to Dublin to be with his dying mother, and for some time was at loose ends. In 1904, perhaps on June 16, the day that Ulysses takes place, Joyce eloped with a chamber maid from Galway named Nora Barnacle, eventually accepting a position as a teacher of English at the Berlitz School in Trieste. There two children were born to the couple, Giorgio in 1906 and Lucia in 1907. (Joyce and Nora were not to be formally wed until 1931).
Joyce's published work began to appear in 1907 with his slim volume of verse Chamber Music. A number of his Dubliners stories first appeared in the Irish Homestead while George Russell (AE) was editor. After considerable trouble with publishers fearing censorship, Joyce finally saw Dubliners appear as a collection of stories in 1914. It was soon followed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, and his career as a writer was launched. He had captured the attention and admiration of other writers, including the influential Ezra Pound.
In 1918 he published Exiles. What secured for Joyce the attention and respect of the literati was the appearance in periodical form of Ulysses, for it was apparent that no literary work remotely like it had ever been published. It is often said that Joyce reinvented each genre as he wrote in it, but as yet there seemed to be no genre into which Ulysses could fit. In 1922 Ulysses was published by Sylvia Beach of the Parisian bookstore Shakespeare & Co. Ulysses, which reconstructs a day in the life of a modern-day Jew in Dublin, patterned after the adventures of an epic hero of Greece, was itself written by a wanderer; the book was begun in Zurich and finished in Paris by an author who spoke to his family in Italian, who in 1941 would be laid to rest in a Swiss cemetery.
Joyce had a love-hate relationship with his native city, but in his entire literary career he never really wrote about any other place. He often said that if Dublin were destroyed he could recreate it from memory, street by street and shop by shop. However, after his elopement in 1904 he never lived there again, and visited infrequently. In 1915 he took his family from Trieste to Zurich in anticipation of the outbreak of war, returning to live in Trieste briefly at the end of World War I. In 1920, at the urging of Pound, he moved with his family to Paris.
Soon after the publication of Ulysses, Joyce began work on his final literary work Finnegans Wake, by far his most experimental and perplexing. Though it was not published as a unified entity until 1939, sections of it appeared in periodical form under its provisional title Work in Progress. During these years Joyce suffered from ocular problems and other medical difficulties. He underwent surgery eleven times and was often quite blind. Shortly after the publication of Finnegans Wake, World War II broke out in Europe and the Joyces left Paris for the south of France while awaiting permission to again enter Switzerland. Three weeks after their arrival in Zurich, Joyce underwent surgery for peritonitis, caused by a perforated duodenal ulcer. He lapsed into a coma and died early on January 13, 1941. He is buried in Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich beneath a statue of him by the American sculptor Milton Hebald.
Sources:
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Dictionary of Literary Biography, v. 36 (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1985).
Dictionary of Literary Biography, v. 162 (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1996).
musical scores for "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" and "May Song It Flourish" by J. Willard Roosevelt.
The Art Collection holds busts of Joyce by Sava Botzaris and Jo Davidson, as well as sculptures, paintings, and drawings by George Barker, Frank Budgen, Zdzislaw Czermanski, Desmond Harmsworth, Augustus John, Harry Kernoff, Wyndham Lewis, Ivan Opffer, A. L. Price, Louis Sargent, and Schoor. Several photos of Joyce can be found in the Photography Collection. The Center is also home to the 564 volumes from Joyce's Trieste library, formed between 1904 and 1920.
For further information see Joyce at Texas: Essays on the James Joyce Materials at the Humanities Research Center by Dave Oliphant and Thomas Zigal, Austin, 1983, a complete issue of The Library Chronicle devoted to James Joyce.
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/joyce.j.html
Source: https://www.la.utexas.edu/users/bump/images/Joyce/James%20Joyce%20bio
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A James Joyce Chronology
1882 Joyce is born on 2 February.
1888-1898 Attends Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College.
1898 Enrols at University College, Dublin.
1902 Graduates from university & goes to Paris.
1903 Returns from Paris. Death of his mother.
1904 Meets Nora Barnacle. Stays briefly at the Martello Tower. Publishes three stories under the name Stephen Daedalus, & begins Stephen Hero. Leaves for Trieste and Pola with Nora.
1905 Continues writing stories for Dubliners. His son, Giorgio, is born in Trieste.
1906 Moves to Rome.
1907 Returns to Trieste where his daughter, Lucia, is born. Chamber Music is published, & Joyce starts writing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
1909 Opens the Volta, the first cinema in Dublin.
1912 Makes his final visit to Ireland.
1914 Dubliners is published, A Portrait of the Artist is serialized, & Joyce starts work on Ulysses.
1915 Finishes Exiles, & moves to Zurich because of the war.
1918 Parts of Ulysses are serialized in America and England.
1919-1920 Returns to Trieste, then moves to Paris.
1921 Ulysses is banned in America.
1922 Ulysses is published by Shakespeare and Company, Paris.
1923 Starts writing ‘Work in Progress’ (later Finnegans Wake).
1927 Pomes Penyeach published.
1931 Marries Nora. Death of his father.
1933 American ban on Ulysses is lifted.
1939 Finnegans Wake is published.
1940 Returns to Zurich because of the war.
1941 Dies on 13 January & is buried at Fluntern cemetery.
Source: http://waiyu.bjfu.edu.cn/document/20130923143650492505.doc
Web site to visit: http://waiyu.bjfu.edu.cn/
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During the XX century a new tendency develops in English art and literature, as well as in the rest of Europe and America, by introducing a new kind of writing welcomed by the great writers like Ezra Pound and Eliot; it is based on the absence of the narrator, so that it becomes a difficult reading for people who don’t appreciate their works. James Joyce is the Irish representative of this age of modernism.
Joyce was born in Dublin but he left Ireland as soon as he could (on 16/06/1904 he went away and met his future wife Nora Barnacle), but he was obliged to return to his country as his mother was dying. In Ireland his family had financial problem and his father was addicted to alchool. Moreover Irish people were completely paralyzed, passive and subdued to the English dominion. He lived with his wife, considered the ideal woman: she faced the same problem James lived and she was very skillful in organizing the family administration and leading.
Joyce is also related to Italo Svevo, as they both lived in Trieste; indeed Svevo was influenced by Joyce, his English teacher. Joyce also spent some time in Paris, so much so that he felt a CITIZEN OF EUROPE; he travelled not feeling any of the country he went of his own.
He hated Dublin but he wrote about Dubliners because he said that “ if I need to describe a situation without using any reference and narrator, I have to describe something I know perfectly”; he also said that “if the Devil has an accent, it would be an Irish accent”, showing his critical attitude towards Irish culture and people.
Joyce was extremely rebellious, deciding to leave Ireland and not staying there as his colleagues who tried to develop the Irish revival. He also was very DARING, not physically speaking because he was blind and not seeing properly, he had an excellent ear: at the end of his life he was able to speak eighteen languages, consequences of his voyages and interests in literature, most of all Dante,Vico, Bruno, French authors and the Norwegen Ibsen. Joyce wanted to read them in the original version.
He also did something very important for literature; people were used to read tales with one, two or more narrators but Joyce adopted a TOTAL REFUSE OF THE NARRATOR; he considered it useless and not necessary anymore, because now the main protagonists are thoughts and not people; the attention focuses on individual thoghts.
In your mind you are completely free and your thoughts move in your mind without ANY CONCEPT OF TIME. Time is not related to the clock but it’s your personal and individual time => Freud’s inflence + Henry Bergson who talked about the “duree” (French word for time), related to an individual passing of time, not concerning with the moments; this idea was supprted by an American psycologist, William James, who talked about thought, mind and time.
The new writer has to concentrate his attention on thoughts or better on FLUX OF THOUGHTS, and describe how thoughts move, why and their consequences. The author deals with MENTAL ACTIONS, not physical, and REACTIONS (the best example of flux of thoughts is Ulysses); for this kind of stories it’s missing:
-a narrator, as there is nobody between the character and the reader =>their contact is direct;
-a plot, device that makes the reading difficult to be followed, but which doesn’t manage you to foresee what is going to happen.
Joyce accused his characters to be paralyzed, passive, always sitting in their houses and let their thoughts move instead of their bodies.
Dubliners is made up of 14 novels plus a final one called The Dead; there is still someone speaking, a sort of narrator, but nothing happens: Irish are ordinary people in an ordinary town doing ordinary things.
Eveline is a story from Dubliners which talks about an Irish girl who lost her family; her job is extremely dissatisfaying but one day she meets a boy, a sailor, who proposes her to follow him. To get out of the paralysis, she has absolutely to say yes to the boy, but she is covered by doubts. At this point of the story her mind starts moving going back to her childhood: she sees a photograph which opens a drawer in her mind reminding of her past, but she is still at the window. This represents what Joyce called the EPIPHANY, a sudden revelation, a song, an object what is able to open a window in the mind of one person and reveal something. Eveline decides to remain in Ireland leading her boring life.
Critics asked why Joyce dedicated his book to Dubliners, as they knew he hated Ireland, and he answered saying that “if Dublin was destroyed people reading my books could rebuilt it”.This book is a description of one day and also Ulysses is regarded to one day.
This was the STYLE of the beginning of the century, wich wanted no plots and dark, gloomy atmospheres with people surviving and psycological introspection.
In Ulysses we have a parallel situation with the Odyssey and its three main characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) and Molly Bloom (Penelope); Leopold and Molly lost their son and they’re looking for him, so that Leopold decides to leave home and one late night he returns with Stephen; Molly is what is called the flesh, instead Penelope represents the loyalty.
Joyce used another tecnique: the STREAM OF COUNSCIOUSNESS, a psychic phenomena,in order to give space to thoughts. The writer needs the INTERIOR MONOLOGUE, usually used in theatres (soliloquies, ex Hamlet “To Be Or Not To Be”) where there is someone talking aloud about his thoughts, feelings and actions; in this case there is an interior monologue and the character is THINKING INSIDE HIMSELF=> this is why you can’t have a narrator.There are 3 kinds of interior monologue:
1)DIRECT interior monologue (used in Ulysses): the thoughts of characters are moving without punctuation-example Molly’s monologue at the end of Ulysses; she is alone with her thoughts;
2)INDIRECT interior monologue (Virginia Woolf used it): there is an introduction, some indication –ex she dreamt, she thought…), so it is easier than the former;
3)EXTREME interior monologue: the character is dreaming and is not completely aware-subconscious –ex Finnegans wake.
The interior monologue is the way used by the author to transcript the stream of consciousness.
We still have someone speaking, so there’s a relation between the reader and this kind of narrator which renders the reading not so difficult. It is made up of 14 short stories plus a final one, The Dead, dedicated to Dublin ordinary people living in an ordinary town doing ordinary things ( he needed to have something he knew perfectly, such as places, dates, names, people- sketches in Dublin). The book is divided into four parts:
1) childhood 2) adolescence 3) nature life 4) public life
plus The Dead, the best example of what Joyce called epiphany, the discovery through very small details, which changes the life of the character who starts thinking according to the flashback he had. In The Dead it will be a song and it is dedicated to Dublin people, remaining dead => the dead people are not those who are buried but we are the living dead; it is mostly referred to Irish people, completely useless, leading an insignificant life and not able to choose.
Plot:Gabriel is a professor and he is very satisfied of his job while Gretta is his beautiful wife; they are having a party for New Year’s Eve(Xmas)at Julia and Kate place (they are the aunts of Gabriel).Gabriel is selected to carry on the speech for the new year. Gretta listening to a song (epiphany) starts crying as it reminds her of a young man, Michael, who used to sing it and who died for her. One night he stayed under the falling rain singing their song but he became ill and died of tubercolosys.
Gretta revealed Gabriel she was crying for melancholy but then she fallen asleep. Gabriel starts thinking that the deads are more important than the living ones because Gretta had never talked him about Michael.
Once again we are moving mentally while Gabriel is sitting “leaning on his elbow”.
Source: http://digilander.libero.it/ricerchescolastiche/inglese/rc/Joyce.doc
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