Today, Finnegan’s Wake is viewed as Joyce’s most obscure and possibly most brilliant work.ģ. Many of Joyce’s supporters thought he was wasting his time on the project, although the playwright Samuel Beckett, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, helped Joyce compile the final text when his eyesight was failing. It has no clear chronology or plot, and it begins and ends on incomplete sentences that flow into each other. The novel, which recounts “the history of the world” through a family’s dreams, employs its own “night language” of puns, foreign words, and literary allusions. To provide a psychological insight comparable to the physical detail, Joyce employed a then-revolutionary technique called stream of consciousness,in which the protagonist’s thoughts are laid bare to the reader.įrom 1922 until 1939, Joyce worked on a vast, experimental novel that eventually became known as Finnegan’s Wake. In recounting Bloom’s day, Joyce mentions everything that happens to Bloom-including thoughts, bodily functions, and sexual acts-providing a level of physical actuality that had never before been achieved in literature. The structure was unique: Joyce recreated one full day in the life of his protagonist, Leopold Bloom, and modeled the actions of the story on those of Ulysses in the Odyssey. The novel was revolutionary in many ways.
Despite these obstacles, Ulysses has come to be generally recognized as the greatest twentieth-century novel written in English. Upon the novel’s publication, both Ireland and the United States immediately banned it as obscene. Joyce’s next book, Ulysses, took seven years to write once he finished writing it, he almost couldn’t find anyone to publish it. “The Dead,” the final story in the collection, is frequently listed as one of the finest short stories ever written. Dubliners (1914), Joyce’s most accessible work, is a collection of short stories describing the paralyzing social mores of middle-class Catholic life. Despite this self-imposed exile, Dublin was the setting for most of his writings. In 1902, at the age of 20, Joyce left Dublin to spend the rest of his life in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich, with only occasional visits back home. The story of his early life and his intellectual rebellion against Catholicism and Irish nationalism are told in the largely autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Young James attended Dublin’s fine Jesuit schools, which gave him a firm grounding in theology and classical languages-subjects that appeared repeatedly in his later work. His father was a civil servant whose poor financial judgment left the family impoverished for much of Joyce’s youth. He was born in Dublin, the first of 10 children in a Catholic family. James Joyce revolutionized the novel, the short story, and modern literature as we know it.
0 kommentar(er)
