BloomsdayHUM 3285: British and American

LiteratureSpring 2011Dr. Perdigao

January 21, 2011

James Joyce (1882-1941)• Born in Dublin, eldest of ten, impoverished family living middle-class lifestyle

• Mother a pianist, involvement in Roman Catholic Church

• Educated by Jesuits, attended University College, Dublin

• 1902, after graduation, goes to Paris

• Returns home after receiving telegram stating mother’s illness; leaves with Nora Barnacle in 1904, for Pula, Trieste

• Never returns to Ireland after 1912

• Dubliners (1914)

• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

• Exiles (1918)

• Ulysses (1922)

• Finnegans Wake (1939)

• After WWII, moves to Zurich, dies in 1941

Reenvisioning Ulysses• http://digital.turn-page.com/issue/20512/34

• http://ulysses.bc.edu/

• http://ulyssesseen.com/

• http://www.bnet.com/blog/media/a-publishing-tradition-apple-censors-joyces-ulysses-a-century-after-the-us-did-the-same/8534

Portrait of the Art• Joyce begins writing Ulysses in 1914, finishes in 1921

• Nausicaa episode controversy, The Little Review; U.S. Post Office charge, lifting ban in 1933

• Thursday, June 16, 1904

• Themes of rebellion and exile (2163)

• Writing about Dublin, becomes symbolic, representative of larger world

• “paralysis” in Dubliners

• Development of artist—Stephen Dedalus

• Exile of the artist—masks, impersonality, ironic detachment of modernist writers (2165)

• Odysseus as “most complete man in literature”: coward and hero, cautious and reckless, weak and strong, husband and philanderer, father and son, dignified and ridiculous (2165)

• Leopold Bloom

• Stephen Dedalus

Paradoxes, Futility, and Anarchy (oh my!)• “paradoxes of human loneliness and sociability” (2166)

• Stream of consciousness technique

• “With its burlesque jostling of cultural structures, myths, discourses and intellectual disciplines, it reenacts in contemporary terms an ancient tale of homecoming and thereby expresses a modern sense of what the human home is: a construction within a void” (Bell 14).

• “Cultural periods are often characterized by dominant metaphors such as the medieval and Renaissance great chain of being, the eighteenth-century clock or machine, or the nineteenth-century organism. In the twentieth century, language itself became the pervasive metaphor. By the mid-century, even the act of conception had become a matter of genetic ‘code.’” (Bell 18)

• “Eliot wanted to make the novel possible again by instilling into it a stricter form. He admired Joyce’s use of Homeric myth as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’” (Trotter 74)