Works 6:

If you read Joyce's work in the same order that he wrote it, the sequence forms a perfect James Joyce tutorial. His early writing is simple and easy to understand, then it gradually becomes more complex as he experimented with he possibilities of language.

Be prepared to extend the range of your vocabulary, to discover prose blended with poetry, and to encounter amazingly inventive word-play in the later work. Joyce's writing was also considered quite scandalous when it first appeared, because it is critical of religion and frank about sexual matters.

Dubliners is his first major work - a ground-breaking collection of short stories in which he strips away all the decorations and flourishes of late Victorian prose style. What remains is a sparse yet lyrical exposure of small moments of revelation - which he called 'epiphanies'. Like other modernists, such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, Joyce minimised the dramatic element of the short story in favour of symbolic meaning and a more static aesthetic.

This collection of vignettes features both real and imaginary figures in Dublin life around the turn of the century. The collection ends with the most famous of all Joyce's stories - 'The Dead'. It caused controversy when it first appeared, and was the first of many of Joyce's works to be banned in his native country. Dubliners is now widely regarded as a seminal collection of modern short stories. New readers should start here.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's first complete novel - a largely autobiographical account of a young man's struggle with Catholicism and his desire to forge himself as an artist. It features a prose style whose complexity develops in parallel with the growth of the hero, Stephen Dedalus. The early pages are written from a child's point of view, but then they quickly become more sophisticated.

As Stephen struggles with religious belief and the growth of his sexual feelings as a young adult, the prose become more complex and philosophical. In addition to the account of his personal life and a critique of Irish society at the beginning of the last century, it also incorporates the creation of an aesthetic philosophy which was unmistakably that of Joyce himself. The novel ends with Stephen quitting Ireland for good, just as Joyce himself was to do - never to return.

Ulysses is probably the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and certainly Joyce's finest work. Taking Homer's Odyssey as a framework, Joyce builds on it a complex narrative of Dublin characters on one day in 1908. Each chapter features a different prose-style to match its theme or subject. One chapter is even written in a manner which traces the history of English prose, from the Renaissance to modern advertising jargon.

It also includes two versions of the 'stream of consciousness' technique. This sought to reproduce the apparently chaotic manner in which our perceptions of the external world mingle themselves with ideas and memories in an undifferentiated and unstoppable river of thought. This includes the famous final chapter which is an unpunctuated eighty page soliloquy of Molly Bloom as she lies in bed at night, thinking over her life and the events of the previous day.

Rather like Picasso, Joyce had a multiplicity of styles, any one of which was enough to make lesser writers famous as they imitated him. Ulysses is a cornerstone of modern English Literature - written by an Irishmanin Trieste, Zurich, and Paris.

Finnegans Wake is famous in literary circles as a great novel which almost no one has ever read. Joyce said that he spent seventeen years of his life writing Finnegans Wake and that he expected readers to spend the rest of their lives trying to understand it. It continues where Ulysses leaves off in terms of linguistic complexity. Written and rewritten many times over, Joyce eventually decided to incorporate many languages other than English into the narrative.

It is a fantastic crossword-puzzle of puns, parodies, jokes and linguistic invention which make enormous intellectual demands on the reader. This, in addition to the many arcane references and a very complex narrative make Finnegans Wake a literary experiment which has never been surpassed. It is one of the great unread masterpieces of twentieth century literature.

The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the 'modern' spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce's developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).

Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question 'What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?' The issue of 'difficulty' raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book's composition and the history of Wake criticism.

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First Paper

Main Page

Academic Year 2008/2009

Ó a.r.e.a./Dr. Vicente Forés López

Ó Paula Vázquez Valero

pauvazva@alumni.uv.es

Universitat de València Press