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| Birth Name(s) : James Joyce |
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Full James Joyce Biography
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Irish Séamus Seoighe; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its highly controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
In 1891, Joyce wrote a poem, "Et Tu Healy," on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. His father was angry at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic church and at the resulting failure to secure Home Rule for Ireland. The elder Joyce had the poem printed and even sent a copy to the Vatican Library. In November of that same year, John Joyce was entered in Stubbs Gazette (an official register of bankruptcies) and suspended from work. In 1893 John Joyce was dismissed with a pension. This was the beginning of a slide into poverty for the family, mainly due to John's drinking and general financial mismanagement.Photograph of James Joyce taken by fellow University College student Constantine P. Curran in the summer of 1904. When asked later what he was thinking at the time, Joyce replied 'I was wondering would he lend me five shillings' (in Ellmann).
Joyce remained in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily. After one of his alcoholic binges, he got into a fight over a misunderstanding with a man in Phoenix Park; he was picked up and dusted off by a minor acquaintance of his father, Alfred H. Hunter, who brought him into his home to tend to his injuries. Hunter was rumored to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife, and would serve as one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the main protagonist of Ulysses. He took up with medical student Oliver St John Gogarty, who formed the basis for the character Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. After staying in Gogarty's Martello Tower for 6 nights he left in the middle of the night following an altercation which involved Gogarty shooting a pistol at some pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed. He walked all the way back to Dublin to stay with relatives for the night, and sent a friend to the tower the next day to pack his possessions into his trunk. Shortly thereafter he eloped to the continent with Nora.
Joyce returned to Dublin briefly in the summer of 1912 during his years-long fight with his Dublin publisher, George Roberts, over the publication of Dubliners. His trip was once again fruitless, and on his return he wrote the poem "Gas from a Burner" as a thinly veiled invective against Roberts. It was his last trip to Ireland, and he never again came closer to Dublin than London, despite the many pleas of his father and invitations from fellow Irish writer William Butler Yeats.
The book consists of 18 chapters, each covering roughly one hour of the day, beginning around about 8 a.m. and ending sometime after 2 a.m. the following morning. Each of the 18 chapters of the novel employs its own literary style. Each chapter also refers to a specific episode in Homer's Odyssey and has a specific colour, art or science and bodily organ associated with it. This combination of kaleidoscopic writing with an extreme formal, schematic structure represents one of the book's major contributions to the development of 20th century modernist literature. The use of classical mythology as a framework for his book and the near-obsessive focus on external detail in a book in which much of the significant action is happening inside the minds of the characters are others. Nevertheless, Joyce complained that, "I may have oversystematised Ulysses," and played down the mythic correspondences by eliminating the chapter titles that had been taken from Homer.
Not everyone is eager to expand upon academic study of Joyce, however; Stephen Joyce, James' grandson and sole beneficiary owner of the estate, has been alleged to have destroyed some of the writer's correspondence, threatened to sue if public readings were held during Bloomsday, and blocked adaptations he felt were 'inappropriate'. On June 12, 2006, Carol Shloss, a Stanford University professor, sued the estate for refusing to give permission to use material about Joyce and his daughter on the professor's website.
General
- Works by James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
- James Joyce Bibliography (Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake + introductory texts)
- The James Joyce Quarterly
- Profile and overview of works from Bookmarks magazine
- Essay on the influence of James Joyce on Popular Music
- James Joyce from Dublin to Ithaca Exhibition from the collections of Cornell University
- The James Joyce Scholars' Collection
- How to Read Joyce, a seminar by Cambridge University Press.
- Essays and Criticism about James Joyce; Texts of his Major Works
- Reference biography of Joyce
- Music in the Works of James Joyce
- James Joyce Centre (Dublin)
- The James Joyce Scholars' Collection from the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.
- A recording of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake from Ubunet
- James Joyce's handwriting as a True Type font
- James Joyce in the streetscapes of Dublin today
- Patrick Healy, in Lacanian Ink 11, on "Joyce: Through the Lacan Glass" |
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