![]() Joyce's relationship with his native country was a complex one and after graduating he left Ireland for a new life in Paris where he hoped to study medicine. Early Works: 'Dubliners' and 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' Largely educated by Jesuits, Joyce attended the Irish schools of Clongowes Wood College and later Belvedere College before finally landing at University College Dublin, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on modern languages. He taught himself Norwegian so he could read Henrik Ibsen's plays in the language they'd been written and spent his free time devouring Dante, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.īecause of his intelligence, Joyce's family pushed him to get an education. He liked to drink and his lack of attention to the family finances meant the Joyces never had much money.įrom an early age, Joyce showed not only exceeding intelligence but also a gift for writing and a passion for literature. ![]() His father, while a talented singer (he reportedly had one of the finest tenor voices in all of Ireland), didn't provide a stable household. He was the eldest of ten children born to John Stanislaus Joyce and his wife Marry Murray Joyce. His exploration of language and new literary forms showed not only his genius as a writer but spawned a fresh approach for novelists, one that drew heavily on Joyce's love of the stream-of-consciousness technique and the examination of big events through small happenings in everyday lives. Joyce battled eye ailments for most of his life and he died in 1941.īorn James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, Joyce was one of the most revered writers of the 20th century, whose landmark book, Ulysses, is often hailed as one of the finest novels ever written. The explicit content of his prose brought about landmark legal decisions on obscenity. ![]() With Ulysses, Joyce perfected his stream-of-consciousness style and became a literary celebrity. He published Portrait of the Artist in 1916 and caught the attention of Ezra Pound. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and short story writer. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. His reputation largely rests on just four works: a short story collection Dubliners (1914), and three novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).įor more discussion of James Joyce, see our analysis of Joyce’s ‘An Encounter’, our commentary on ‘The Sisters’, our summary of ‘Clay’, and our introduction to free indirect speech. James Joyce (1882-1941) is one of the most important modernist writers of the early twentieth century. Like many a modernist story, it is open-ended even when, like the street where the narrator lives, it appears to have reached its dead end. ‘Araby’, then, is a story about frustration and failure, but it ends on a note of ‘anguish and anger’, without telling us what will befall the narrator and the girl who haunts his dreams. ![]() There are many such moments in this shortest of short stories which repay close analysis for the way the young narrator romanticises, but does not sentimentalise, the feeling of being in love, perhaps hopelessly. ![]() This is a true but also heightened in its romanticism: true because it captures what it is to be in love with a special person, especially when in the first flushes of adolescence.īut it is also romantic in the extreme because of the religious and courtly idea (nay, ideal) of love present in that idea of being the girl’s cupbearer (‘I bore my chalice’), the crying (but then, the disarmingly direct parenthetical admission of not knowing why), and the romantic idea of Old Ireland inscribed in that harp, which also carries a frisson of the erotic (with the girl’s words and gestures acting like the finger’s touches all over the boy’s body). But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. ![]()
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