JAMES JOYCE
LIFE
• Born in Dublin in 1882 (from a fam belonging to the Catholic middle class);
• He studied at University College: Italian, French and English;
• He moved to Trieste to work as a language teacher and become friend with Italo
Svevo, who greatly influenced Joyce’s style and themes;
• between 1914 and 1920 he moved to Zurich, then to Paris;
• he died in Zurich in 1941.
STYLE
• The first part of his production is marked by a realistic approach:
-his plots are rather linear, language is controlled and syntax is logical
-he uses powerful symbols.
• The second part of his production is more experimental:
he uses the stream of consciousness technique.
THEMES
• IRELAND: with whom Joyce has a complex relationship
-he abandons it, but all his works are setted there
-it’s represented as a country dominated by stagnation and stasis.
• PARALYSIS of the modern world.
MAIN WORKS
ULYSSES: 1922, the novel is set in Dublin on one single day (16 June 1904).
DUBLINERS
• It’s a collection of 15 short stories, published in 1914; the stories revolve around the
lives of 15 typical inhabitants of Dublin and represent an ideal portrait of the Irish ca-
pital at the beginning of the 20th century.
• THEMES:
The city of Dublin is a static and provincial town that gives its inhabitants no chan-
ce to grow and develop their own potential.
-The stories can be devided in 3 groups:
1. stories about CHILDHOOD with a strong sense of disillusionment and fai-
lure;
2. stories about ADULTHOOD impossibility to escape, frustration, lack of
freedom;
3. stories about the RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN the IRISH PEOPLE and
their INSTITUTIONS paralysis and lack of life.
- Paralysis: it’s both physical and spiritual
spiritual stagnation of the self
physical impossibility to escape
• STYLE:
The narrative technique is apparently traditional:
-rejection of the Victorian omniscent third-person narrator;
-mix of realism and subjective perspective;
-use of free direct thought and free speech;
-use of internal perspective.
THE ‘STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS’
-Is a literary technique which consists in reproducing the free flow of thoughts, feelings
and sensations of the characters without comments by the author.
-It was the result of the interactions of a series of important factors, such as:
1. the influence of the theories of Sigmund Freud and the revalutation of the role of
the unconscious;
2. the theorisation of the difference between objective (or chronological) and subjecti-
ve (or inner) time made by Henri Bergson;
3. the sense of anxiety, fragmentation and loss caused by the experience of the First
World War.
‘PARALYSIS’
It’s the universal condition of inaction that affects all the inhabitants of Dublin: in Dubli-
ners is a spiritual and physical death.
‘EPIPHANY’
It’s the sudden revelation of a hidden reality (of their condition of paralysis);
the potential way to escape from the universal paralysis.
(The world ‘epiphany’ means ‘revelation’/’manifestation’)
