James Joyce (redirected from Joyce, James (Augustine Aloysius))

Joyce, James 

Born Feb. 2, 1882, in Dublin; died Jan. 13, 1941, in Zurich. Irish writer.

Joyce graduated from a Jesuit boarding school and from University College, Dublin (1902). In 1904 he left his homeland, and from 1920 he lived in Paris. Joyce made his literary debut in 1907 with the book of poetry Chamber Music, but it was his prose that brought him fame. In the collection of short stories The Dubliners (1914; Russian translation, 1937) he portrayed “little people” oppressed by petit bourgeois life. In several of the stories Joyce expressed his opposition to English oppression of Ireland.

The novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) showed how the young protagonist freed himself from moral and religious dogmas and obligations but simultaneously rejected social struggle and national-liberation ideals. Joyce’s hero is confined in the narrow circle of artistic interests.

Joyce’s main work, the novel Ulysses (1922), fully develops the stream of consciousness technique, which was already noticeable in the Portrait of the Artist. Without at-tempting to describe reality as a whole, the author fixes on the most insignificant acts, sensations, and thoughts of the characters. In this kaleidoscopic view, the aimlessness and banality of life are sketched out, personified in the Dubliner Bloom, one of the novel’s heroes. In objective terms, the novel is an indictment of bourgeois civilization, but Joyce’s criticism lacks perspective, inasmuch as he is convinced of the age-old corruption of human society.

Joyce tried to show the inner world of man and capture the most subtle, fleeting responses of his main characters to the outside world, which is sometimes described with scientific precision. At the same time he searched his characters for echoes of features depicted in ancient myths. This explains the similarity between the story of Bloom and Stephen, the heroes of Ulysses, and the story of the heroes of the ancient epic.

Joyce’s experimentation with language and style and his extremely complex symbolism violated all the classic forms of the novel, a trend that is particularly striking in Finnegans Wake (1939), which focuses on the dreams of the central character. Joyce had an enormous influence on the modernist trend in literature.

WORKS

In Russian translation:[Chapters from Ulysses.] Inter nat sional naia literatura, 1935, nos. 1-3, 9-12; 1936, nos. 1-4.

REFERENCES

Startsev, A. I. “O Dzhoise.” Internatsional’naia literatura, 1936, no. 4.
Zhantieva, D. G. Dzheims Dzhois. Moscow, 1967.
Gilbert, S. J. Joyce’s Ulysses. London, 1960.
Burgess, A. Here Comes Everybody. London [1965].
Ellmann, R. James Joyce. London, 1966.
Goldberg, S. L.Joyce. Edinburgh-London [1967].
Anderson, C. G. James Joyce and His World. London [1967]
The Celtic Master! Contributions to the First James Joyce Symposium, Held in Dublin, 1967. [Dublin, 1969.]
A Bash in the Tunnel: J. Joyce by the Irish. Brighton [1970].
J. Joyce: The Critical Heritage, vols. 1-2. London [1970]
Parker, A. D.James Joyce: A Bibliography of His Writings, Critical Material, and Miscellanea. Boston, 1948.

E. V. KORNILOVA