JAMES JOYCE James Joyce LIFE James Joyce was the first and the most important amongst the great experimentalists of the 20th century. He was born in Dublin from a good family in decline and was educated in his native town. He specialised in languages and graduated in 1902. He took no part in the Irish literary revival, which accompanied Irish political nationalism because, as one can clearly infer from his novels, he felt the Irish environment frustrating, and provincial. He decided to cut himself free from his family, country end religion by escaping from Ireland into permanent self-exile. He live in Paris, Trieste (where he met Italo Svevo) and Zurich.He continued to write about Dublin, the town that he recreated and described by using his memory, which remained for him the centre of the world. In a visit to Ireland he met Nora Barnacle, with whom he spent the rest of his life; they had a son and a daughter. His friendship with Yeats and Pound greatly encouraged Joyce's career and reputation. In 1917 an attack of glaucoma caused him to become totally blind. He was also troubled by his daughter's mental illness.His famous novel Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922 and in the UK in the 1936. Soon it became one of the literary scandals of the century. In Paris, Joyce rapidly became one of the most distinguished writers: in the stimulating atmosphere of the intellectual capital of the post-war Europe he felt free to experiment new narrative techniques. The reactions to his works are diverse: ranging from praise to shock.In the 1939, with the outbreak of World War II, Joyce returned to Zurich, where he died in the 1941.The importance of Joyce is that he had renewed the literature. His books are very different from the tradition. Joyce uses the technique of the manipulation of time and he doesn't respect the chronological order; he uses the association of ideas and flashback. In his stories there isn't only one point of view, but he expresses the points of view of many characters. He became famous with his neologism and his "exploration" of the language, but he always uses the same theme: the dryness of his time. DUBLINERS Dublin, Joyce's city of birth, is represented as the symbol of the entire world, like a dead background. The theme of death is common in his stories: the last is "The dead" and the last word is "dead".This stories were written between 1903 and 1914, and were published in 1915. They are divided into four parts, like the human life:- 3 stories about children- 4 stories about young boys- 4 stories about adults- 3 stories about public lifeThe last story is a sort of summing up of the themes of each story. Dubliners are chronicles of spiritual, political and social paralysis of a city. The fifteen novels of Dubliners reflect an Ireland disappointed, annoyed and displeased. Captives of boredom, soul and feelings become dry, the characters of these stories apparently banal, try to escape from the immobility of their country.The c Continua »