James Joyce, Dubliners and Ulysses.ppt !

James Joyce
Dubliners and Ulysses
WHITE SPACES - Culture, literature and languages

James Joyce – boyhood and after
• Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and went to a
Jesuit boarding school. This experience had a
profound effect on him and he saw the Church as
one element of oppression of the Irish people
• After university, Joyce left Ireland in 1902, and
after 1912 never set foot in his native land again
• He saw his exile as a way of freeing himself from
the paralysis of Ireland

Joyce as a Young Man
• In Dublin in 1904 he had met Nora Barnacle.
• Nora agreed to leave Ireland with Joyce and went with him abroad.
• She became his life-long companion, the mother of his two
children.
• The couple lived mainly in Italy and France.
• Initially Joyce worked as an English teacher for the Berlitz School in
Trieste

Publications and Literary Contacts
• In 1909, Joyce became a friend of Italo Svevo. He helped “La
Coscienza di Zeno” to reach public notice.
• “Dubliners”, mainly written in Italy, was published in 1914
• His major work, “Ulysses”, was considered obscene and banned in
Britain, and was published in France in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, who
owned the famous ‘Shakespeare and Company’ bookshop in Paris
• Through Sylvia Beach, Joyce became well-known in avant-garde
literary circles

James Joyce – later life
• Joyce’s revolutionary use of
language in his novels
meant that the wider
reading public did not
understand them and they
did not sell well
• He and his family often lived
in poverty and were helped
by friends who believed that
Joyce was a genius
• He moved from Paris to
Zurich on the outbreak of
war in 1939, and died there
in 1941

Naturalism
• Joyce’s early fiction is Naturalist in style
• Naturalism is an extension of Realism, evolutionary and
deterministic theories lie at its base
• The fictional world is described with detachment and scientific
objectivity
• People’s lives seem conditioned by the environment and by fate

Dubliners 1
• “Dubliners” is a collection of
fifteen short stories,
published in 1922
• It is the most accessible of
Joyce’s literary works and
revolves around Irish life at
the beginning of the
twentieth century
• The stories concern episodes
of everyday life, private and
public; the conversion of the
everyday into art would uplift
their readers

Dubliners 2
• Each story would witness a brief moment of self-
understanding of the main character, their epiphany.
• Lack of action at this crucial moment would confirm their
paralysis of will
‘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’.
• The stories reflect the
ambivalent attitude and
contradictory feelings
Joyce always had towards
Ireland

Dubliners 3
• The collection contains
14 stories which fit into
a clear structure
• The final and fifteenth
story, “The Dead”,
closes the collection
but stands outside this
main structure
• The stories are
grouped into those
regarding childhood,
adolescence, mature
life and public life

Eveline 1
• It is a story of adolescence
• It centres on a nineteen-year-old who has the chance to make a new start
away from her hard life in Dublin
• The greater part of the story deals
with her thoughts, fears
and indecision as she
looks back on her life
and forward to her
new one, far away from
Ireland
• She considers her life
with her father and her
younger siblings, her job,
her mother and the promise
she made to her as she died
• She also thinks about her
boyfriend Frank and the
kind of life she might have
with him

Eveline 2
• Although she reaches a moment of self-understanding and seems
to be on the point of escaping…
• She ultimately suffers the paralysis of will which is typical of the
characters in “Dubliners”
• Joyce saw this failure to change and rebel as a psychological
straightjacket: Family, Church and Society in Ireland

Modernism
• At the beginning of the twentieth century, many writers fell
under the influence of psychologists like Freud and Jung,
anthropologists like Frazer, theories regarding the role of myth
in society, and the philosopher Nietzsche
• Old systems of support
such as religion and
shared beliefs crumbled.
The idea of an objective
reality failed.
• Novelists and poets
attempted to express
this new, subjective
reality in their works

Modernism 2
• New techniques were invented to represent inner
life and subjective reality
• Past, present and future would co-exist
• Plot would be reduced
to a minimum and
be replaced by a
series of impressions
or moments of being
• Language and the act
of writing became
of central importance

Interior Monologue
• The flow of a character’s thoughts are represented on the
page with no interference
• Free direct thought from a first person, interior point of view
• In its extreme form, stream of consciousness, logic,
coherence, syntactic and
graphic impositions
disappear to leave a
series of impressions,
sensations, memories
in free association
• Author and narrator
are suppressed

The Mythical Method
• Once the traditional narrative method associated with novel-writing
has been abandoned as ineffective, control, order and structure
must be found elsewhere
• Joyce and other writers turned to myth to create a kind of
scaffolding to give “shape and significance” to their works
• T.S. Eliot referred to this new method as the “mythical method”

Ulysses – Introduction
• Joyce’s masterpiece is the classic Modernist text and has had
immense influence on novel writing ever since it was first
published
• It deals with the events of a single day, from 8am to 2am
• Most of the action takes place within the thoughts of the
principal characters as they walk around Dublin

Ulysses and Homer
• The novel draws its structure
from myth: Homer’s “Odyssey”
• Parallels are created between
the two works by analogy and
antithesis
• In the “Odyssey”, Odysseus is
undertakes a heroic journey as
he seeks to return home, and his
wanderings are reflected in
Leopold Bloom’s wanderings
around Dublin and his finally
reaching his house.
• The 18 episodes of “Ulysses”
correspond loosely to episodes
in the “Odyssey”

Characters
• The three principal characters in “Ulysses” provide further
parallels with the “Odyssey”
• Leopold Bloom is Odysseus himself, his wife Molly is
Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus
• While the characters of the “Odyssey” are heroic and larger
than life, those in
Ulysses are
introspective
and ordinary.

Ulysses – The Language
• Joyce’s aim in writing the novel was
to reproduce the random and
chaotic thought processes that
constantly occupy our minds
• These thought processes are often
incoherent as we leave them
halfway through, pile part-thoughts
on part-thoughts and freely
associate ideas
• Joyce invents words, refers to
classical texts and employs both
arcane vocabulary and the speech
of the uneducated in the Dublin
streets

Molly Bloom’s Monologue
• The most revolutionary episode of the novel is Molly’s
monologue, a long and rambling series of thoughts
• It consists of 4,391 words, with only two punctuation marks
• It begins and ends
with the word “yes”,
the final affirmative
closing a circle of
thoughts

Joyce’s Words
• Joyce invented a large number of words, many of them
onomatopoeic
• He called one of his notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and
words that came to him, scribbledehobble
• He also made the noun ‘sausage’ into a verb and opened the way
for future writers to experiment with language

James Joyce, Dubliners and Ulysses.ppt !

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