Scarica James Joyce's Life and Literary Journey: From Dublin to Zurich and Back e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882, in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. He was the eldest of ten surviving children; two of his siblings died of typhoid. In 1887 the family had to move to the small town of Bray, because his father was appointed rate collector by Dublin Corporation. Joyce had begun his education in a Jesuit school near Clane in 1888 but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees; then thanks to a reduction of the taxes, he attended to the Belvedere College. After that, in 1898 Joyce enrolled at the University College Dublin (UCD) and he also became active in theatrical and literary circles in the city. During this period, Joyce wrote many articles and at least two plays and in 1900 a laudatory review of Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken was his first publication. In 1901 Joyce was first introduced to the Irish public by Arthur Griffith in his newspaper. After graduating from UCD in 1902, Joyce left for Paris to study medicine, but he soon abandoned this after a time (maybe because he found the technical lectures in French too difficult ). He stayed on for a few months but when his mother was diagnosed with cancer, he returned to Ireland. (She died on 13 August). In 1904 he attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics but it was rejected so he decided to convert the story into a novel called Stephen Hero that will be published after his death. The same year he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman who was working as a chambermaid. Joyce remained in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily. After one of these drinking nights, he got into a fight over a misunderstanding with a man in St Stephen's Green; shortly after this event, he decided to leave Ireland with Nora. Joyce and Nora moved first to Zurich in Switzerland, where he taught English in a language school; then the director of the school sent him on to Trieste but he discovered there was no position for him, so he finally found a teaching position in Pola. In 1905 (same year Nora gave birth to their first child, Giorgio) the Austrians expelled all aliens so he moved back to Trieste and began teaching English. But Joyce became frustrated with life there and moved to Rome in late 1906 where he found a job in a bank. He disliked Rome, and moved back to Trieste in 1907, year when his daughter Lucia was born. He spent most of the next years between Dublin and Trieste; in 1912 he fought against Dublin publisher over the publication of Dubliners. In Trieste Joyce became very close to Italo Svevo who was a Catholic of Jewish origin and thanks to that most of the details about the Jewish faith in Ulysses came from Svevo's responses to queries from Joyce. In 1915, Joyce moved to Zurich because of the World War I; there he met the socialist painter Frank Budgen (whose ideas are visible in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) and Ezra Pound who brought him the attention of a publisher that provided him a lot of money and allowed him to focus on his writing leaving the teaching job. In Zurich he began serious work on Ulysses, and after the war he returned to Trieste as he had originally planned.Then in 1920 he went to Paris and he ended up living there with the family for the next twenty years. In paris Joyce finished Ulysses and also Finnegans Wake; during these years, his eyes began to give him more and more problems, so he had to undergo to several operations. In 1940 Joyce returned to Zurich, and the next year he underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer; he fell into a coma and then he died on 13 January 1941. Joyce's body was interred in the Fluntern Cemetery near Zurich Zoo. Joyce’s masterpiece is Ulysses (1922) a work in which the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey are paralleled in a group of several contrasting literary style, such as the stream of consciousness which is surely his most known technique. Other famous works are Dubliners (a short-story collection published in 1914), the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Then there are three books of poetry, a play and his published letters.
