• A rebel among rebels.

• Contrast with Yeats and the

other literary contemporaries

who tried to rediscover the Irish

Celtic identity.

The Joyces in Paris

James Joyce (1882-1941)

The Joyces in Paris

• He had two children, Giorgio

and Lucia, with his long-time

partner, Nora Barnacle, whom

he eventually married.

• He left Dublin at the age of

twenty-two and he settled for

some time in Paris, then in

Rome, Trieste, where he made

friends with Italo Svevo, and

Zurich.

• The setting of most of his works Ireland, especially Dublin.

• He rebelled against the Catholic Church.

• All the facts explored from different points of view simultaneously.

. The most important features of Joyce’s works

• Greater importance given to the inner world of the characters.

• Time perceived as subjective.

• His task to render life objectively.

. The most important features of Joyce’s works

Isolation and detachment of the artist from society

Realism

Disciplined prose

Different points of view

Free-direct speech

Dubliners

. The evolution of Joyce’s style

• Published in 1914 on the newspaper The Irish Homestead by Joyce with the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus.

. Dubliners

• Dubliners are described as afflicted people.

• All the stories are set in Dublin “The city seemed to me the centre of paralysis”, Joyce stated.

Nassau Street, Dublin, early 20th century

• The stories present human situations• They are arranged into 4 groups:

The Sisters

An Encounter

Araby

After the Race

The Boarding House

Eveline

Two Gallants

A Little Cloud

Clay

Counterparts

A Painful Case

Ivy Day in the Committee Room

A Mother

Grace

Mature life Public lifeAdolescenceChildhood

DUBLINParalysis / Escape

. Dubliners: structure and style

• Naturalistic, concise, detailed descriptions.

• Naturalism combined with symbolism double meaning of details.

• Each story opens in medias res and is mostly told from the perspective of a character.

• Use of free-direct speech and free-direct thought direct presentation of the character’s thoughts.

7. Dubliners: narrative technique and themes

. Dubliners: narrative technique and themes

• Different linguistic registers the language suits the age, the social class and the role of the characters.

• Use of epiphany “the sudden spiritual manifestation” of an interior reality.

• Themes paralysis and escape.

• Absence of a didactic and moral aim because of the impersonality of the artist.

Joyce’s aim to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through epiphany.

. Dubliners: epiphany

It is the special moment in which a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation or an episode lead the character to a sudden

self-realisation about himself / herself or about the reality surrounding him / her.

Understanding the epiphany in each story is the key to the story itself

. Dubliners: paralysis

• The climax of the stories the coming to awareness by the characters of their own paralysis.

• Alternative to paralysis = escape which always leads to failure.

• The story opens in medias res “She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue”

• Third-person narrator but Eveline’s point of view.

• Subjective perception of time.

Dubliners: Eveline

Structure and style

• The protagonists: Gabriel Conroy, an embodiment of Joyce himself, and Gretta, his wife.

• Epiphany the song The Lass of Aughrim, reminds Gretta of a young man, Michael Furey, who died for her when he was seventeen years old. Gabriel understands he is deader than Michael Furey in Gretta’s mind.

• Symbols the snow, Gabriel’s journey to the west.

Dubliners: The Dead

Angelica Huston in John Huston’s The Dead (1987)

. The evolution of Joyce’s style

Interior monologue with two levels of narration

Extreme interior monologue

Ulysses

Victorian novel Ulysses

Setting in time and place

Victorian towns (London); English countryside

Dublin

Narrative technique Third-person narrative technique

Stream-of-consciousness technique

Subject matter Realistic, naturalistic The character’s mind

Characters Presented from the outside

Presented from the inside

Language Realistic and concrete Language of the mind

Ulysses and the Victorian novel

Published in 1922.

Setting in time a single day,

Thursday 16th June, 1904.

The setting in place Dublin.

A detailed account of ordinary life on an ordinary day.

The theme is moral human life means suffering but also struggling to seek the good.

. Ulysses

Ulysses, London, Egoist Press, 1922 (first English edition, printed in France).

Leopold Bloom Joyce's

common man; he stands for the

whole of mankind.

Molly Bloom Leopold’s wife; she

stands for flesh, sensuality,

fecundity.

Stephen Dedalus pure intellect;

he embodies every young man

seeking maturity.

. Ulysses: characters

Poster for Sean Walsh’s Bloom (2003)

Odyssey a structural framework for Ulysses.

Characters and events arranged around Homeric model Leopold = OdysseusMolly = PenelopeStephen = Telemachus

• Ulysses is divided into Telemachiad (chapters 1-3)Odyssey (chapters 4-15)Nostos (chapters 16-18)

. Ulysses: the relation to Odyssey

Head of Odysseus from a Greek 2nd century BC marble group representing Odysseus blinding Polyphemus, found at the villa of Tiberius at Sperlonga.

It allowed the parallel with the Odyssey and provided the book with

a symbolic meaning.

Homer’s myth used to express the universal in the particular.

It created a new form of realism.

. Ulysses: the mythical method

o psychologyo ethnologyo anthropology

It was linked to the progress made by:

The stream of consciousness technique The cinematic technique

Dramatic dialogueJuxtaposition of eventsQuestion and answers

The language rich in puns, paradoxes, images, interruptions, symbols, slang expressions; different linguistic registers to give voice to the unspoken activity of the mind.

. Ulysses: a revolutionary prose

Collage technique

• Use of interior monologue 2 levels of narration.

1st level: actions narrated from the outside neutral point of view.

2nd level: Leopold’s thoughts Bloom’s point of view

The action takes place in his mind.

There is no difference between past, present and future.

11. Ulysses: The Funeral Part III

Leopold attends a funeral.

Use of extreme interior monologue.

Molly’s thoughts are free to move backwards (“they called it on…”) and forwards in time (“shall I wear…”).

Complete absence of punctuation and introductions to people and events, spelling and grammar mistakes they give voice to her flow of thoughts.

. Ulysses: Molly’s monologue

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Her father Leslie Stephen was an eminent Victorian man of letters.

She grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere with free access to her father’s library

Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse led to depression

the death of her motherwhen she was 13

her stepbrothers

Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.

. Literary career

The Bloomsbury Group In 1904

she moved to Bloomsbury and became a

member of the Bloomsbury Group. This

meant the rejection of traditional morality

and artistic convention.

Experimentation best known as one

of the great experimental novelists during

the modernist period.

Only Connect ... New Directions

The Bloomsbury Group

• Main aim to give voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory.

• The human personality a continuous shift of impressions and emotions.

• Narrator disappearance of the omniscient narrator.

• Point of view shifted inside the characters’ minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas, momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux.

. A modernist novelist

Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915, Tate Gallery, London

. Mrs Dalloway (1925)• Takes place on a single ordinary day

in June 1923.

• Follows the protagonist through a very small area of London, from the morning to the night of the day on which she gives a large formal party.

• Clarissa Dalloway’s party is the climax of the novel and unifies the narrative by gathering all the people she thinks about during the day.

Cover for the first edition of Mrs. Dalloway, London, Hogarth Press,

1925.

• A London society lady of fifty-one, the wife of a Conservative MP, Richard Dalloway, who has conventional views on women’s rights.

• Had a possessive father, refused Peter Walsh, a man who would force her to share everything.

Clarissa Dalloway

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• Characterized by opposing feelings: her need for freedom and independence and her class consciousness.

• Her life appears to be an effort towards order and peace, an attempt to overcome her weakness and sense of failure.Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen

Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Clarissa Dalloway

. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Septimus Warren Smith

• A young poet and lover of

Shakespeare.

• When the war broke out,

enlisted for patriotic reasons.

• An extremely sensitive man who

can suddenly fall prey to panic

and fear, or feelings of guilt.

Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Septimus Warren Smith

• A character specifically

connected with the war.

• Suffers from headaches and

insomnia.

• Finally commits suicide.Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

1. Woolf vs Joyce

Woolf’s stream of consciousness

Joyce’s stream of consciousness

never lets her characters’ thoughts flow without control,

maintains logical and grammatical organisation

characters show their thoughts directly through

interior monologue, sometimes in an incoherent and

syntactically unorthodox way

Moments of being Epiphanies

Rare moments of insight during the characters’ daily

life when they can see reality behind appearances

The sudden spiritual manifestation caused by a trivial gesture, an external object the character is

led to a self-realization about himself/herself

2. Woolf vs Joyce