James Joyce (1882–1941)

James Joyce (1882–1941) He was an Irish novelist. He revolutionized the methods of depicting characters and developing a plot in modern fiction.

James Joyce --Ireland In the 20th c., Joyce was deeply influenced by Ireland and wrote all his works about Dublins.

Joyce, the childhood The eldest of ten children born in a Dublin suburb. His family was quite well off at first. But after the father’s death, the Joyce family fell into worse and worse poverty.

Religion and education Like most Irish people, his parents were religious Catholic. And Joyce’s education came under the influence of priests. Eventually he and his youngest brother were admitted without paying to another school run by Jesuit Priests. He was a very good student and the leaders hoped he would become a priest. But he left in disgrace because he lost all faith in the religion during his last year at school.

Artist in exile Dublin College (1899–1902), where he studied languages. literature. When Joyce graduated in 1902, he knew he would become a writer and an exile. Joyce believes, the artist could only work outside the established social order. He went to France, Italy and Switzerland.

works In his early years abroad he began to write poems, short stories and an autobiographical novel about Stephen Hero. But his book of short stories entitled The Dubliners was not published until 1914. His autobiographical novel was published in 1916 under the title of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Ireland How he loved his country and how he is loved by his people Most of his works were related with Ireland and especially Dublin Revealed the real world and especially the spiritual world of the people Most of the stories and characters came from his own experiences He influenced many later writers like Samuel Becket Waiting for Godot《等待戈多》

Dubliners Dubliners mirrors the poverty-stricken years of early exile. It is a look back in anger. Joyce portrays his countrymen as drunks, cheats, boasters, gossips and schemers: failures all, people who cannot take the chances life offers them and who, as in Araby, prevent the young from taking theirs.

Dubliners His summary judgment of Ireland appears as a word on the very first page of the book: paralysis. One theme running through Dubliners is that the best men are gone, that Ireland’s golden age is past. They also re-present the themes of frustrated ambition –social, political, artistic, and romantic. In Ireland only the dead are perfect; the living are failure.

MODERNISM CULTURAL CONNECTIONS

DEFINITION MODERNISM (1900-1940) A revolutionary movement encompassing all of the creative arts that had its roots in the 1890s, a transitional period during which artists and writers sought to liberate themselves from the constraints and polite conventions we associate with Victorianism.

Formal characteristics Open form Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the poems follow what the words and phrase suggest during the composition process, rather than being fitted into any pre-existing plan. Some do employ vestiges of traditional devices but most regard them as a hindrance to sincerity or creativity.

Intertextuality Classical Allusions the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. Classical Allusions a stylistic device or trope, in which one refers covertly or indirectly to an object or circumstance that has occurred or existed in an external context Allusion differs from the similar term intertextuality in that it is an intentional effort.

Thematic characteristics Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future Disillusionment Rejection of history and substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology Product of the metropolis of cities and urbanscapes Stream of consciousness

Canonical Modernist Authors T.S. Eliot W.B. Yeats James Joyce Virginia Woolf Ernest Hemingway Franz Kafka Gertrude Stein F. Scott Fitzgerald Ezra Pound