James Joyce 1882 1941 STUDY QUESTIONS MILLENNIUM 2

James Joyce (1882 - 1941) STUDY QUESTIONS MILLENNIUM 2 P. 184

STUDY QUESTIONS 1. What do you know of Joyce’s early life? • He was born into a middle-class family with financial problems; his father, a strong supporter of Charles Parnell’s ideals of an independent Ireland, retired from politics and social life after Parnell’s death and thus became to young James the symbol of the failures of his country. 2. Why did he leave Ireland commit himself to permanent exile? • Because he considered life in Ireland an obstacle to his own artistic development. (Some of his early works had been refused publication). 3. What three European towns became his home during his voluntary exile? • Trieste, Zurich and Paris. 4. What are his main works and which one is partly autobiographical? • “Dubliners” (1914); “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916), partly autobiographical, “Ulysses” (1922) and “Finnegans Wake” (1934).

5. Can we say that by leaving Ireland he cut all bonds with his native country? • No, in fact all his works are centred on the Dublin of his early years. 6. What do we mean by “the journey of Joyce’s narrative”? • We refer to Joyce’s technique of shifting from the particular to the universal, from realistic to symbolical. In other words, the journey of Joyce’s narrative is from small to large, from the connected short stories of Dubliners to the great picture of Dublin life that is “Ulysses” and from the lyrical style of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” to the epic style of “Ulysses”.