James Joyce Born in a suburb of Dublin

James Joyce • Born in a suburb of Dublin, on February 2 nd 1882 • In 1888 Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit school • 1893 Belvedere College, a Jesuit school • 1898 University College Dublin • 1902 Degree in Foreign Languages

James Joyce • 1904: met Nora Barnacle (they married in 1931). • 1904 -1915: they lived in Trieste (from July 1906 to March 1907 in Rome). Joyce contributed to “Il Piccolo della Sera” and met Italo Svevo • 1912 – Last journey to Dublin. Joyce never visited Ireland again • 1913 – Correspondence with Ezra Pound • 1914 – Joyce met Ezra Pound • 1915 – Joyce moved to Zurich • 1920 – Joyce moved to Paris. Here he met Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, F. S. Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein • 1940 – in Zurich again • 1941 – Joyce dies in Zurich in 1941

James Joyce: literary career • 1900: “Ibsen’s New Drama”, Fortnightly Review • 1900 -1902: short poems later collected in Chamber Music and prose pieces called “epiphanies”(W. B. Yeats) • 1904: A Portrait of the Artist (essay), then turned into the novel • 1904: “The Sisters”, Irish Homestead • 1904 -5 Stephen Hero (ch. 14 -25) • 1914 - 1915: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man serialized in “The Egoist” • 1914: Dubliners • 1918: Exiles • 2 February 1922: Ulysses, published in Paris by Shakespeare & Co. • 1923: starts writing Finnegans Wake • 1934: Ulysses published in the USA • 1936: Ulysses published in the UK • 1939: Finnegans Wake published in the UK and the USA

Dubliners: historical background • 1801: Act of Union: Ireland became part of the extended United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, ruled by a united parliament at Westminster in London • 19 th and 20 th centuries: rise of modern Irish nationalism • Charles Stewart Parnell (1846 -1891): Irish Parliamentary Party. Campaign for Home Rule: autonomy of Ireland within the union

Dubliners: historical backgound • The Act of Union 1801: Beginning of Dublin’s decline in both political and economic terms (highest death rate in the country) • “The lack of dynamism from the rural Irish economy and the failure of Dublin businesses to manufacture, and, in some cases, even to distribute the manufactured goods which rural Ireland needed, plus the apparent stagnation of the port in the third quarter of the nineteenth century all meant that Dublin failed to provide adequate employment either for the indigenuous population or even for a small proportion of the surplus populations of rural Ireland” Mary Daly, Dublin, The Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History 1860 -1914, 1984 • Dubliners: lower middle class, petit-bourgeois world of shopkeepers and tradesmen, functionaries of one kind or another, clerks, bank officials, salesmen.

Dubliners: historical background • 1914: Home Rule Bill passed (with the exclusion of the six counties of Ulster) but suspended for the duration of WW 1 • 1916: Easter Rising • 1920: Government of Ireland Act • 1922: Irish Free State • 1937: New Constitution • 1949: Republic of Ireland

Dubliners • “I am writing a series of epicleti - ten - for a paper. I have written one. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city. ” (J. Joyce, Letter to Curran of early 1904)

Dubliners • 1904: Joyce publishes “The Sisters”, “Eveline” and “After the Race” in The Irish Homestead • 1904 -6: Joyce wrote all the other stories except for “The Dead” (1907) • Joyce submitted the volume for publication to Grant Richards in 1905 and 1907, and then to Maunsel & Co. , but it was rejected. It was finally published by Grant Richards in 1914

Dubliners • “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished lookingglass” James Joyce, Letter to Grant Richards, 23 June 1906 • “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in the style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter it in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen or heard” James Joyce, Letter to Grant Richards, 5 May 1906

Dubliners • Childhood: “The Sisters”, “An Encounter”, “Araby” • Adolescence: “After the Race”, “The Boarding House”, “Eveline”, “Two Gallants” • Maturity: “A Little Cloud”, “Clay”, Counterparts”, “A Painful Case” • Public Life: “Ivy Day in the Commitee Room”, “A Mother”, “Grace” • “The Dead”

“The Sisters” • Basic situation derived from “The Old Watchman”, by Berkeley Campbell, a typical Irish Homestead story • Gnomon: the remainder of a parallelogram after removal of a similar parallelogram containing one of its corners. The stylus of a sundial that throws the shadow which indicates the hours of the day • Simony: the selling or giving in exchange of a temporal thing for a spiritual thing (i. e. buying of a blessing, purchase of ecclesiastical favour, or of pardons). It originates from Simon Magus in the Acts of Apostles who sought to gain spiritual powers by payment

Epiphany • “By an epiphany he meant sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself”, James Joyce, Stephen Hero