James Joyce(1882-1941)
• Born in Dublin into a middle-class Catholic family.
• His father had been a supporter of Charles Parnell.
• He attended University College, Dublin.
• In 1902, he went on a self-imposed exile Paris, Pula, Trieste.
• At the outbreak of World War I, he left for Zurich.
• In 1920, he moved to Paris.
His Life
• Dubliners (1914)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Ulysses (1922)
• Finnegans Wake (1939)
His Works
A complex relationship
he rejected everything
his works are centred
that was Irish
on Ireland, Dublin
Early 20th - century Dublin
occupies every page written by Joyce
Joyce and Ireland
His self-imposed style had given him the objectivity he needed to write
about Ireland with the necessary emotional and intellectual detachment.
Joyce’s novels show a similar shift from:
•the particular to the universal;
•the lyrical style to the epic style.
Joyce’s Narrative
• A collection of 15 short stories
the failure of self-realisation of an inhabitant of Dublin.
• The first 14 were written by 1905, the last and longest story was
finished by 1907.
• Joyce’s 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’
This sense of paralysis is presented in four stages:
childhood, adolescence, maturity, public life.
Dubliners
• Realistic the degree of perfectly recreating characters,
places, streets, pubs and idioms of Dublin.
• Joyce makes use of a symbolic effect:
it gives the common object an unforeseen depth and becomes the
key to a new view of reality.
• He coined the definition of epiphany:
‘manifestation, showing’ a moment when a simple
object/fact/situation suddenly flashes out with meaning and makes a
person realise his/her condition.
Realism and Symbolism
• The climax to all the other stories
• …and their counterpoint, too
detached objectivity gives place to lyrical intensity.
• Gabriel is the central character of the story:
the best representative of all failed Dubliners;
he is what Joyce would have become if he had stayed in Ireland.
The Dead
• It begins with the Christmas party that the Morkan sisters organise
each year.
• The guests, both Catholic and Protestant, debate crucial arguments
Irish politics in relation to Britain.
• Gabriel Conroy, the Morkan sisters’ nephew, is a journalist who has
an unfulfilled personality he prefers not to expose himself and to
continue his usual life.
• Late at night, Gabriel and Gretta, his wife,
go back to their hotel.
The Story
• Gabriel and Gretta are in their room.
• Gretta has just kissed him:
a song heard at the party brings forth forgotten
memories:
they bring about hidden depths of feeling and a
new awareness of her relationship with Gabriel.
For Gabriel, it comes when he thinks he
has full possession of his wife.
I Think He Died for Me
Gretta throws herself crying on to the bed.
She reveals she is crying for a boy she used to know long ago.
This revelation is not sudden, but gradual.
It brings about a series of further emotional shocks for Gabriel:
that the boy, Michael Furey, died for love of Gretta.
The End
• Gabriel has just listened to Gretta’s story.
• He reflects on how poor a part he has played in his wife’s life and
feels his own pettiness.
• In the end, he feels elevated to the world of spirit, the region of the
dead, symbolically mapped by the snow falling all over Ireland.
The Living and the Dead
