Thursday, April 21, 2016

James Joyce - Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

  • Modernist
  • 1882; Rathgar near Dublin Ireland
  • Clongowes Wood College
  • Belvedere College
  • University College in Dublin
  • Companion of Modernism
  • Published in serial form 1914-1915
  • Details of Joyce's early life
  • novel's protagonist Stephen Dedalus
  • impoverished father/highly Catholic mother
  • powerful autobiographical experience among fictional settings
    • Christmas Dinner
    • 1st sexual experience with Dublin Prostitute
  • Politics & religion of early-twentieth-century Ireland
  • Ireland under British rule since 16th Century
    • Religions tension
    • political tension - potato blight of 1845
  • White colonies
    • Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand
  • India
  • Africa
  • Joyce 1882 born in Dublin
  • Joyce's father drank all his inheritance, Broke by time Joyce is 12
  • Joyce's mother - 4 boys 6 girls
  • dies at 44
  • poverty and chaos
  • bio by Richard Ellmann
  • Joyce sent to Jesuit school at 6
  • Joyce wanted to write the truth
  • graduate from college at 16, Latin, French, Italian
  • Gets to know Yeates,
  • He runs to Italy with Nora to teach English at a Berlitz school
  • Joyce says the main theme in paralysis. What keeps them trapped?
  • Fear of change (Eveline) doesn't choose at all
  • Pale and cold=death
  • lots of internal death
  • Characters are not self-aware. Most never ask "what do I want?"
  • "The general paralysis of an insane society"
  • Little Chandler - big dreams, no effort, trapped
  • Mr. Duffy - 
  • turns prose into poetry
______________________________________________________
  • Stephen Dedalus, young boy growing up in Ireland at the end of the 19th Century
  • Gradually cast off social, familial & religious constraints
  • father inept with money, family further in debt
  • sexual encounter = shame/guilt
  • reconcile stern Catholic faith
  • Variety of sins
    • Masterbation
    • gluttony
    • more visits with prostitutes
  • rededicate to Christian piety
  • so devout; asked to enter priesthood
  • love & desire of beauty should not be sources of shame
  • life to the fullest
  • breaks constraints of family, nation & religion again
  • leave Ireland
  • build wings he can fly above all obstacles & achieve life as an artist
  • Individual consciousness
  • Pitfall of Religions extremism
  • Role of an Artist
  • WWI - no plot, fragmentation, no trust in old values
  • Didn't want to tell their story with old tools
  • Chapter 1 - epiphany - Lifes unfairness, stand up for yourself
  • Chapter 2 - epiphany - meets the prostitute
  • Chapter 4 - epiphany - needs to be an artist
  • Took himself from the inside to the outside
  • Irish identity
  • No God, no Ireland
  • dramatic irony of what he thinks and what we think
  • shallow in relation to women/mother/whore

No comments:

Post a Comment