Bloomsday

1. Bloomsday HUM 3285: British and American Literature Spring 2011 Dr. Perdigao January 21, 2011

2. James Joyce (1882-1941) • Born in Dublin, eldest of ten, impoverished family living middle-class lifestyle • Mother a pianist, involvement in Roman Catholic Church • Educated by Jesuits, attended University College, Dublin • 1902, after graduation, goes to Paris • Returns home after receiving telegram stating mother’s illness; leaves with Nora Barnacle in 1904, for Pula, Trieste • Never returns to Ireland after 1912 • Dubliners (1914) • Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) • Exiles (1918) • Ulysses (1922) • Finnegans Wake (1939) • After WWII, moves to Zurich, dies in 1941

3. Reenvisioning Ulysses • http://digital.turn-page.com/issue/20512/34 • http://ulysses.bc.edu/ • http://ulyssesseen.com/ • http://www.bnet.com/blog/media/a-publishing-tradition-apple-censors-joyces-ulysses-a-century-after-the-us-did-the-same/8534

4. Portrait of the Art • Joyce begins writing Ulysses in 1914, finishes in 1921 • Nausicaa episode controversy, The Little Review; U.S. Post Office charge, lifting ban in 1933 • Thursday, June 16, 1904 • Themes of rebellion and exile (2163) • Writing about Dublin, becomes symbolic, representative of larger world • “paralysis” in Dubliners • Development of artist—Stephen Dedalus • Exile of the artist—masks, impersonality, ironic detachment of modernist writers (2165) • Odysseus as “most complete man in literature”: coward and hero, cautious and reckless, weak and strong, husband and philanderer, father and son, dignified and ridiculous (2165) • Leopold Bloom • Stephen Dedalus

5. Paradoxes, Futility, and Anarchy (oh my!) • “paradoxes of human loneliness and sociability” (2166) • Stream of consciousness technique • “With its burlesque jostling of cultural structures, myths, discourses and intellectual disciplines, it reenacts in contemporary terms an ancient tale of homecoming and thereby expresses a modern sense of what the human home is: a construction within a void” (Bell 14). • “Cultural periods are often characterized by dominant metaphors such as the medieval and Renaissance great chain of being, the eighteenth-century clock or machine, or the nineteenth-century organism. In the twentieth century, language itself became the pervasive metaphor. By the mid-century, even the act of conception had become a matter of genetic ‘code.’” (Bell 18) • “Eliot wanted to make the novel possible again by instilling into it a stricter form. He admired Joyce’s use of Homeric myth as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’” (Trotter 74)