James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 . He attended Jesuit schools before studying at University College, Dublin. Joyce worked as an English teacher at the Berlitz School of Languages, where he met the Italian novelist Italo Svevo. In 1940 Joyce and his family fled France for Zurich in advance of the Nazi invasion. Joyce died aged 58 in 1941
Literary production
Short stories Dubliners (1914). •His semi-autobiographical first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published in 1916. In 1922, his masterpiece, Ulysses was published in Paris, after having been declared obscene and banned in Britain and America. His huge experimental novel Finnegans Wake was published in 1939.
Interior monologue and epiphany
Joyce makes frequent use of interior monologue, both direct and indirect. Through this technique, the writer almost disappears and the readers find themselves directly inside a character’s mind. Another characteristic of Joyce’s writings is the peaks of intensity in the narration that the writer calls ‘epiphanies’. An epiphany is a sudden revelation, a moment in which a spiritual awakening is experienced, when ordinary thoughts and feelings come together to produce a new awareness. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies .
‘Dubliners’Joyce’s first short stories were published in 1914 in a collection called Dubliners. They form a realistic and evocative portrait of the lives of ordinary people in Dublin and the city itself is a real protagonist of the novel. The stories are arranged in four groups that correspond to four ‘phases’ of life: 1 childhood ,2 adolescence 3 maturity and 4 public life- A recurrent theme in all the stories is the feeling of paralysis that many of the characters experience as a result of being tied to narrow cultural, social and political traditions and by repressive religious and moral codes. ‘The centre of paralysis’ is Dublin.
The stories in Dubliners are written in an apparently traditional way with a but it contains some of the elements of Joyce’s more experimental later work. These are: the absence of a moralising narrative voice, description of characters’ inner thoughts and use of symbolism. Each story is told from the perspective of a particular character, rather than through an omniscient narrator.
EVELINE
Eveline belongs to the group of short stories dealing with lack of vitality and unthusiasm even in young Dubliners. Eveline has'agreed to'run away from an oppressive and violent father and a miserable homel to follow Frank, a sailor from Buenos Aires. In the end, she does not have the courage to go aboard the ship that would take her and Frank to Buenos Aires. She just stands on the quay, unable to move, as if paralyzed.
ULYSSES
It was published in 1922 in Paris. The novel was banned for obscenity in England until 1936. Ulysses is modelled on Homer’s Odyssey. Just as Homer’s epic hero wandered about the Mediterranean, Mr Bloom wanders about the streets of Dublin. Like Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s novel is one of the greatest examples of reworking of myth. Joyce, however, uses the epic method to stress the lack of heroism, ideals, love and trust in modern life. The novel is characterized by the absence of a dramatic plot. To convey the life of an individual in a single day, Joyce uses the stream of consciousness technique, a difficult prose style which juxtaposes disparate and apparently incongruous images in the attempt to show the flow of thoughts, as they first come to a person’s mind.