James Joyce

James Joyce

He was born in Dublin, on 2^nd February 1882; he had got a good education at Jesuit school and University College in Dublin. He loved his country, Ireland, but did not agree with the nationalist movements. He lived in Trieste and Rome, but he moved to Zurich during the first world war. After he went to Paris, but he died in Zurich in 1941. In Trieste he met Italo Svevo and he became a friend of him. His main works are Dubliners, A Finnegan's Wake, A Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, that was found obscene. Joyce believed that the job of the artist was not to convince, but to make people see. He adopted some innovations in narrative technique; he used different narrative voices, different point of view and different linguistic styles; moreover he made extensive use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness. Joyce's main themes are the human condition and the subjectivity of experience. They also all have an autobiographical dimension.

Joyce's main work is Ulysses. He had always been fascinated by the myth of Ulysses, and chose to represent him in the person of Leopold Bloom, a modest advertising agent, a jew who lives in catholic Dublin.

The agonies of Ulysses' years of wanderings and separation from Penelope find their parallel in the personal frustrations of Bloom, who goes around Dublin on his daily business while his wife entertains her lover at home.

Homer's Ulysses wandered for long years; in Joyce's novel the whole of the action is confined to a single day, 16^th June 1904.