james joyce

Modernist literature is exemplified in the works of Hamsun, J.Joyce, V.Woolf, F.Kafka and others. Its hallmarks are hostility to the products of the Academy and unpredictability. As with modernist movements in painting and sculpture, even in literature, the art-maker blends himself with his creations. If in pre-modernist literature the writer and his novel were two [...]

Youth In the four novels about youth two feminine figures are counterbalanced by two masculine figures. Eveline, one of the main characters of the first novel, still not the protagonist, is the mirror image of the masculine world around her. She has to decide whether to leave her home or not to follow Frank, her [...]

About 1905 Joyce wrote most of Dubliners, a whole which he perceived less as a sequence of stories than as a kind of multi-faceted novel. To Joyce, Dublin was a ghost of the great conception of city that had polarized the mind of Europeans from the time of Pericles. It was a shell of grandeur, [...]

The keywords in understanding Joyce’s Dubliners are language and Dublin. As a young boy he was attentive to the language spoken in his circumambient, the language of barflies, the language of gossip, common language. There are different sources that speak of Joyce’s struggles to establish connections between words and reality, a process that had its [...]

Probably for Joyce that was not a technique but just a phenomenon which he couldn’t dent for a phrase’s sake. Joyce had always been fascinated by the power of the word to confer an idea. Still, what struck him most was the way people misused words in a speech. In many letters to his publishers [...]