ABSTRACT
I will speak un this work about the life
and the career of James Joyce.
And talking
about this book, I have to speak of the most important symbol of James Joyce:
the interior monologue, and how this writer introduced, the interior monologue,
in English Narrative, ad I will tell of the differences between the Homero´s “Odyssea” and Joyce´s
“Ulysses”
The project is formed by: this abstract, the short biography of James
Joyce and for finish the conclusion and bibliography.
PROJECT
. Biography.
Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius (1882-1941), Irish novelist and poet, whose
psychological perceptions and innovative literary techniques, as demonstrated
in his
epic novel “Ulysses”, make him one of the most influential writers of
the 20th century
Joyce was born in Dublin on february2,1882, the son of a poverty-stricken
civil servant.
He was educated at Jesuit School, including University College, Dublin.
Raised in the Roman Catholic faith, he broke with the church while he was in
college. In 1904 he left Dublin with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid whom he
eventually married. They and their two children lived in Trieste, Italy, Paris,
and Zürich,Switzerland, meagrely supported by Joyce´s jobs as a language
instructor and by gifts from patrons. In 1907 Joyce suffered an attack of
iritis, the first of the severe eye troubles that led to near blindness. After
20 years in Paris, early in World War II, when the Germans invaded France,
Joyce moved to Zürich, where he died on January 13,1941.
Early works.
As an undergraduate Joyce published essays on literature. His first
book,”Chamber Music” (1907), consists of 36 highly finished love poems, which
reflect the influence of the Elizabethan lyricists and the English lyric poets
of the1890s. In his second work, “Dubliners” (1914), a collection of 15 short
stories, Joyce dealt with crucial episodes of childhood and adolescence and of
family and public life on Dublin.
His first long work of fiction, “A Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
(1916), is largely autobiographical, re-creating his youth and home life in the
story of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. In this work Joyce made considerable
use of the stream-of-consciouness, or interior-monologue, technique, a literary
device that renders all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of a character
with scrupulous psychological realism. Another early work was the play “Exiles”
(1918).
Later works.
Joyce attained international fame with the publication (1922) of
“Ulysses”, a novel the themes of which are based on Homer´s Odyssey. Primarily
concerned with a 24-hour period in the life of an Irish Jew, Leopold Bloom,
Ulysses describes also the same in the life of Stephen Dedalus, and the story
reaches its climax in the meeting of the two characters. The main themes are
Bloom´s symbolic search for a son and Dedalus´s growing sense of dedication as
a writer. Joyce further developed the stream-of-consciousness technique in this
work as a remarkable means of character portrayal, combining it with the use of
speech and the parody of literary styles as an overall literary method.
“Finnegans Wake” (1939), Joyce´s last and most complex work, is an
attempt to embody, in fiction a cyclical theory of history. The novel is
written in the form of an interrupted series of dreams during one night in the
life of the character Humphery Chimpdem Earwicker. Symbolizing all humanity,
Earwicker, his family, and his acquaintances blend, as characters do in dreams,
with one another and with various historical and mythical figures. Joyce
carried his linguistic experimentation to its furthest point in Finnegans Wake
by writing English as a composite language based on combinations of parts of
words from various languages. His other late publications include two
collections of verse, “Pomes Penyeach” (1927) and “Collected Poems” (1936) and
“Stephen Hero”, which, although not published until 1944, was an early version
of A Potrait.
Joyce employed symbols to create what he called an “epiphany”, the
revelation of certain inner qualities. Thus, the earlier writings reveal
individual moods and characters and the plight of Ireland and the Irish artist
in the early 1900s. The two later works reveal his characters in all their
complexity as artists and lovers and the various aspects of their
relationships. Using experimental techniques to convey the essential nature of
realistic situations, Joyce merged in his greatest works the literary
traditions of realism, naturalism, and symbolism.
.
Project
Joyce has been preparing himself
to write Ulysses since 1907. It grew steadily more
ambitious in scope and method, and represented a sudden outflinging of
all he had
learned as a writer up to 1914. It use of many styles was an extension
of the method
of A Portrait of the Artist, where the style, at first naïve, became
romantic and then
dramatic to suit Stephen’s ontogeny. Now Joyce hit upon the more radical
device
of the undependable narrator with a style adjusted to him. He used this
in several
episodes of Ulysses, for example in Cyclops, where the narrator is so
obviously hostile
to Bloom as to stir up sympathy for him, in Nausicaa, where the
narrator’s gushiness
is interrupted and counteracted by Bloom’s matter-of-fact reporting, and
in Eumaeus,
where the narrator writes in a style that is constabular. The variety of
these devices made T.S. Eliot speak of the ‘anti-style’ of Ulysses, but Joyce
does not seem to oppose style so much as withdraw it to a deeper level.
The more famous of the devices of Ulysses, the interior monologue, was
also the result
of earlier experiments. He did not allow his characters the sudden,
tense climaxes
towards which James ushered the people of his books, and preferred
instead to subdue
their dramas. His protagonists moved in the world and reacted to it, but
their basic
anxieties and exaltations seemed to move with slight reference to their
environment.
They where so islanded, in fact, that Joyce’s the mind of a character
without the
chaperonage of the author, seems a discovery he might have been expected
to make.
Joyce’s first interior monologue was inserted at the end of A Portrait of
the Artist,
where however he makes it seems less extraordinary by having Stephen
write it in a
journal.
Another formative element in Ulysses, the counterpoint of myth and fact,
was begun
when Joyce first envolved the name and character of Stephen Dedalus. In
Ulysses
Joyce uses not only the Homeric and post-Homeric legend, but a variety
of other
Identifications: Stephen is not only Daedalus but Icarus, Hamelt,
Shakespeare,
Lucifer. But the principal task in the book was to find a pagan hero
whom he could
set loose in a catholic city, to make Ulysses a Dubliner.
In Ulysses he plays Stephen’s youthful point of view against Bloom’s
mature point
Of view, often confronting them with the same places and ideas. So the
two traverse
at different times the same parts of Dublin, or think of like thinks at
the same moment.
They repeat each other and then the events are recapitulated on a deeper
level in the
Circe episode, and again, in wider contexts, in the last two episodes, Itaca
and Penelope. The enclosing framework in Ulysses is in part the body which
supplies an
organ to preside over each episode, but it is also the day, which
interacts with the
minds of the characters, certain hours encouraging certain moods. In the
end the
whole day seems to terminate in Molly Bloom’s nocturnal mind; life
returns to its
source.
Joyce’s version of the epic story is a pacifist version. He developed an
aspect of the
Greek epic which Homer had emphasized less exclusively, namely, that
Ulysses
was the only good mind among the Greek warriors. The brawny men,
Achilles and
Ajax and the rest, relied on their physical strength, while Ulysses was
brighter, a
man never at a loss. But of course Homer represents Ulysses as a good
warrior, too.
Joyce makes his modern Ulysses a man who is not physically a fighter,
whose mind
is unsubduable. The victories of Bloom are mental, in spite of pervasive
physicality
of Joyce’s book. Homer’s Ulysses has been made less athletic but he
retains the
primary qualities of prudence, intelligence, sensitivity, and good will.
The relationship of Bloom and Ulysses has sometimes been thought to be
more tenuous
than this: Ezra pound, for example, insists that the purpose of using
the Odyssey is
merely structural, to give solidity to a relatively plotless work.
Bloom’s monologue is a continuous poetry, full of phrases of
extraordinary intensity.
Stephen and Molly, have their own particular forms of eloquence,
although Molly’s
is
limited in scope and Stephen’s is hyperconscious; Bloom’s surpasses theirs. But
there are other examples of interior monologue in Ulysses which show
none of this
disparity between conversation and inward thought.
Joyce’s
surface naturalism in Ulysses has many intricate supports and one of the most
interesting is the blurred margin. He introduces much material which he
does not
intend
to explain. For example on the way to the funeral the mourners catch sight of
Reuben J.Dodd
and mister Dedalus says “ the devil break the hasp of his back”.
The relation
of Bloom and Stephen confirms Joyce’s point of view in another way:
Bloom’s common
sense joins Stephen’s acute intelligence; Stephen Dedalus, the Greek-
Christian-Irishman,
joins Bloom Ulysses, the Greek-Jewish-Irishman, the cultures seem
to unite
against horsepower and brutality in favor of brainpower and decency.
. Conclusion.
I think that James
Joyce is very important for English Narrative and Literature in generally,
because he introduced in English Narrative the interior monologue and more
authors of our days are influence by Joyce. Joyce created a new form of write.
. Bibliography.
http://geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6681/joyce.htlm
Book “James Joyce” by Richard Ellmann.