James Joyce (1882-1941)
•
A rebel among rebels.
•
Contrast with Yeats and the
other literary contemporaries
who tried to rediscover the Irish
Celtic identity.
The Joyces in Paris
•
He had two children, Giorgio
and Lucia, with his long-time
partner, Nora Barnacle, whom
he eventually married.
•
He left Dublin at the age of
twenty-two and he settled for
some time in Paris, then in
Rome, Trieste, where he made
friends with Italo Svevo, and
Zurich.
The Joyces in Paris
. The most important features of Joyce’s works
• The setting of most of his works  Ireland,
especially Dublin.
• He rebelled against the Catholic Church.
• All the facts  explored from different points of
view simultaneously.
. The most important features of Joyce’s works
• Greater importance given to the inner world of the
characters.
• Time  perceived as subjective.
• His task  to render life objectively.
Isolation and detachment of the artist from society
. The evolution of Joyce’s style
Realism
Disciplined prose
Different points of view
Free-direct speech
Dubliners
. Dubliners
•
Published in 1914 on the newspaper The Irish Homestead by
Joyce with the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus.
•
Dubliners are
described as afflicted
people.
•
All the stories are set in
Dublin  “The city
seemed to me the
centre of paralysis”,
Joyce stated.
Nassau Street, Dublin, early 20th century
. Dubliners: structure and style
•
•
The stories present human situations
They are arranged into 4 groups:
The Sisters
After the Race
A Little Cloud
An Encounter
The Boarding
House
Clay
Ivy Day in the
Committee
Room
Counterparts
A Mother
A Painful
Case
Grace
Araby
Eveline
Two Gallants
Childhood
Adolescence
Mature life
DUBLIN
Paralysis / Escape
Public life
7. Dubliners: narrative technique and themes
• Naturalistic, concise, detailed descriptions.
• Naturalism combined with symbolism  double
meaning of details.
• Each story opens in medias res and is mostly told from the
perspective of a character.
• Use of free-direct speech and free-direct thought  direct
presentation of the character’s thoughts.
. Dubliners: narrative technique and themes
• Different linguistic registers  the language suits the age,
the social class and the role of the characters.
• Use of epiphany  “the sudden spiritual manifestation” of
an interior reality.
• Themes  paralysis and escape.
• Absence of a didactic and moral aim because of the
impersonality of the artist.
. Dubliners: epiphany
Joyce’s aim  to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life
through epiphany.
It is the special moment in which a trivial
gesture, an external object or a banal situation
or an episode lead the character to a sudden
self-realisation about himself / herself or
about the reality surrounding him / her.
Understanding the epiphany in each story is the key to the story itself
. Dubliners: paralysis
• The climax of the stories  the coming to awareness
by the characters of their own paralysis.
• Alternative to paralysis = escape which always leads
to failure.
Dubliners: Eveline
Structure and style
•
The story opens in medias res 
“She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue”
•
Third-person narrator but Eveline’s point of view.
•
Subjective perception of time.
Dubliners: The Dead
•
The protagonists: Gabriel Conroy,
an embodiment of Joyce himself, and
Gretta, his wife.
•
Epiphany  the song The Lass of
Aughrim, reminds Gretta of a young
man, Michael Furey, who died for her
when he was seventeen years old. 
Gabriel understands he is deader
than Michael Furey in Gretta’s
mind.
•
Symbols  the snow, Gabriel’s
journey to the west.
Angelica Huston in John Huston’s The Dead (1987)
. The evolution of Joyce’s style
Interior monologue with
two levels of narration
Extreme interior
monologue
Ulysses
Ulysses and the Victorian novel
Victorian novel
Ulysses
Setting in time and
place
Victorian towns
(London); English
countryside
Dublin
Narrative technique
Third-person narrative
technique
Stream-ofconsciousness
technique
Subject matter
Realistic, naturalistic
The character’s mind
Characters
Presented from the
outside
Presented from the
inside
Language
Realistic and concrete
Language of the mind
. Ulysses





Published in 1922.
Setting in time  a single day,
Thursday 16th June, 1904.
The setting in place  Dublin.
A detailed account of ordinary life on
an ordinary day.
The theme is moral  human life
means suffering but also struggling
to seek the good.
Ulysses, London, Egoist Press, 1922 (first English edition,
printed in France).
. Ulysses: characters



Poster for Sean Walsh’s Bloom (2003)
Leopold Bloom  Joyce's
common man; he stands for the
whole of mankind.
Molly Bloom  Leopold’s wife; she
stands for flesh, sensuality,
fecundity.
Stephen Dedalus  pure intellect;
he embodies every young man
seeking maturity.
. Ulysses: the relation to Odyssey


•
Odyssey  a structural framework for
Ulysses.
Characters and events arranged around
Homeric model 
Leopold = Odysseus
Molly = Penelope
Stephen = Telemachus
Ulysses is divided into 
Telemachiad (chapters 1-3)
Odyssey (chapters 4-15)
Nostos (chapters 16-18)
Head of Odysseus from a Greek 2nd century BC marble
group representing Odysseus blinding Polyphemus, found at
the villa of Tiberius at Sperlonga.
. Ulysses: the mythical method

It was linked to the progress made by:
o
o
o

psychology
ethnology
anthropology
It allowed the parallel with the Odyssey and provided the book with
a symbolic meaning.

Homer’s myth  used to express the universal in the particular.

It created a new form of realism.
. Ulysses: a revolutionary prose
The stream of consciousness technique
The cinematic technique
Dramatic dialogue
Juxtaposition of events
Question and answers
Collage technique
The language  rich in puns, paradoxes, images, interruptions, symbols,
slang expressions; different linguistic registers to give voice to the
unspoken activity of the mind.
11. Ulysses: The Funeral
Part III
Leopold attends a funeral.
• Use of interior monologue  2 levels of narration.
1st level: actions narrated from the outside  neutral point
of view.
2nd level: Leopold’s thoughts  Bloom’s point of view
The action takes place in his mind.
There is no difference between past, present and future.
. Ulysses: Molly’s monologue



Use of extreme interior monologue.
Molly’s thoughts are free to move backwards (“they
called it on…”) and forwards in time (“shall I wear…”).
Complete absence of punctuation and introductions
to people and events, spelling and grammar mistakes
 they give voice to her flow of thoughts.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Her father Leslie Stephen
was an eminent Victorian
man of letters.
She grew up in a literary
and intellectual
atmosphere with free
access to her father’s library
Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.
Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse led to depression
the death of her mother
when she was 13
her stepbrothers
. Literary career
The Bloomsbury Group  In 1904
she moved to Bloomsbury and became a
member of the Bloomsbury Group. This
meant the rejection of traditional morality
and artistic convention.
Experimentation  best known as one
The Bloomsbury Group
of the great experimental novelists during
the modernist period.
Only Connect ... New Directions
. A modernist novelist
• Main aim  to give voice to the complex
inner world of feeling and memory.
• The human personality  a continuous
shift of impressions and emotions.
• Narrator  disappearance of the
omniscient narrator.
• Point of view  shifted inside the
characters’ minds through flashbacks,
associations of ideas, momentary
impressions presented as a continuous flux.
Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915,
Tate Gallery, London
. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• Takes place on a single ordinary day
in June 1923.
• Follows the protagonist through a
very small area of London, from the
morning to the night of the day on
which she gives a large formal party.
Cover for the first edition of Mrs.
Dalloway, London, Hogarth Press,
1925.
• Clarissa Dalloway’s party is the
climax of the novel and unifies the
narrative by gathering all the people
she thinks about during the day.
. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Clarissa Dalloway
Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen Gorris’s
1997 film adaptation
•
A London society lady of fifty-one,
the wife of a Conservative MP,
Richard Dalloway, who has
conventional views on women’s
rights.
•
Had a possessive father, refused
Peter Walsh, a man who would force
her to share everything.
. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Clarissa Dalloway
Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen
Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation
•
Characterized by opposing feelings:
her need for freedom and
independence and her class
consciousness.
•
Her life appears to be an effort towards
order and peace, an attempt to
overcome her weakness and sense of
failure.
. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Septimus Warren Smith
• A young poet and lover of
Shakespeare.
• When the war broke out,
enlisted for patriotic reasons.
Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film
adaptation
• An extremely sensitive man who
can suddenly fall prey to panic
and fear, or feelings of guilt.
. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Septimus Warren Smith
• A character specifically
connected with the war.
• Suffers from headaches and
insomnia.
Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film
adaptation
• Finally commits suicide.
1.
Woolf vs Joyce
Woolf’s stream of
consciousness
Joyce’s stream of
consciousness
never lets her characters’
thoughts flow without control,
maintains logical and
grammatical organisation
characters show their
thoughts directly through
interior monologue,
sometimes in an
incoherent and
syntactically unorthodox
way
2. Woolf vs Joyce
Moments of being
Epiphanies
Rare moments of insight
during the characters’ daily
life when they can see
reality behind appearances
The sudden spiritual
manifestation caused by a
trivial gesture, an external
object  the character is
led to a self-realization
about himself/herself