Introduction to European Culture free essay sample

This family sees its financial difficulties deteriorating during the years. Between bankruptcy and redundancy, John Joyce obliges his family to move about fifteen times in a few years: with the father’s actions they have lost so many degrees in the social scale and continued to decrease. It is on this bottom of social decline that is made Joyce’s education. In 1888, James’ father sends him to the Jesuit middle school of Clongowes Wood and Joyce soon excels at religious education, English composition, mathematics, in the running and cricket. From this moment, and in spite of the big interest that he shows to the religion, the anticlerical jokes of his father bring him to ask themselves questions, which he brings back to us in Dedalus, on the order and the justice that embody his Jesuit teachers. The end of year 1891 is marked by new financial difficulties for John Joyce, which entails the retreat of James de Clongowes Wood. After two years, studying alone, James enters because of a favour the middle school Belvedere of Dublin, where he obtains remarkable results. At the same time, the double break with his family and with the religious education is going to become clearer and develop the young Joyce in the direction of a bigger and bigger responsibility in front of the transgression that announces as inevitable. When he was fourteen, at the same time as an unformulated questioning of its religious faith, he asserts its faith in the art. James is engaged in numerous readings and not only texts’ classic, which are so many discoveries in charge of teachings: Erckmann-Chatrian, Thomas Hardy, Meredith and especially Ibsen. During his sixteen, while he is going to enter University College of Dublin, the break with the Catholicism is consumed inside, otherwise publicly. Joyce penetrates into the literary world on the occasion of the reading, in 1900, in front of the Company of literature and history, an entitled essay the Drama and the life. Afterward, this essay can look as a manifesto; it contains a presentation of intention and method. It separates peremptorily the drama, with its intrigues pretexts to talk, that it is Greek or Shakespearean, from the literature as practice sending back to the unchanging frames of the human nature, but taking support on an individual experience which commits the real-life experience and the language of the writer. At the university, he confirms his opening on Europe, in particular towards Italy, the language of which he masters now. He reads and studies in depth Dante, D’Annunzio, Giordano Bruno, but also Thomas Mann, Tolstoi, Dostoievski, Flaubert, Nietzsche: all the authors we can read in this period. In 1902, he obtains his diploma of Bachelor of Arts; Dublin is then an intellectual center, and the literary life is there very active, maintained by W. B. Yeats, G. Moore, J. Synge, Standish O Grady, George Russell and lady Gregory. To make sure that every situation will allow him to express itself freely, Joyce decides to begin studies of medicine. Repeaters post would be necessary for him to meet the spending of these new studies. He takes pretext of a refusal of his application to proclaim that we join forces against him to silence him and, in 1902, he chooses to study in Paris. This shy exile is only a try before the total intellectual and spiritual exile that takes away him definitively from Ireland and from his aborigines (except for some rare visits, the last one in 1912). When he returns in Ireland in 1903, it’s for his mother’s death. Joyce knows then in Dublin an unstitched enough existence, which reminds his father and he begins drinking. He takes singing lessons; he borrows some money systematically to all his friends and falls out with a large number of them for diverse causes. He meets Nora Barnacle, beautiful young woman, simple and lively, who breaks her solitude; it’s with her that he decides to leave Ireland who rejects him. He has already begun to write Stephen the hero (first version of Dedalus) and publishes several novels of People of Dublin. By leaving for Zurich, James takes Ireland in his flesh and in his spirit to recreate it within a world that is going to replace the earth that it avoids. The reader who opens any of his works is confronted with an itch of bibliographic notations sending back as well to the private life of the author that in the public life of Ireland, even universe. They are not there as such, but mixed inextricably with the substance of a world of replacement: the literary object. Of Zurich, James and Nora quickly pass in Trieste. There, always put into debt, they lead a picaresque existence. It’s in opposition with the realistic illusion of XIXth century denounced by Paul Valery, against the current of the naturalistic literary production, that Joyce publishes his first papers. In all the novel of People of Dublin, life of the author child and the dublinoise life under all its aspects compose paintings where the human relationship assert themselves on a sinister mode. His chaotic and unstable life defines Joyces technical innovations in the art of the novel. It includes an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions. In a railway station in Holland, en route home to Trieste after his final trip to his homeland, Joyce writes, in 1912, this cutting satire in the voices of the Dublin publisher George Roberts and the printer, John Falconer. The publication history of Dubliners was a series of broken promises and confusion. John Falconer did print 1,000 copies of Dubliners in the summer of 1910, a year after the signed contract with Maunsel, but they were not bound or released. Two years later, after negotiations between Richards and Joyce became irretrievably bitter and public, they were destroyed. According to Joyce the 1,000 copies were burned (hence Gas from a Burner) though Richards averred that they were merely cut up and pulped. Joyce rescued one copy of his early masterpiece from destruction and never returned to Ireland. Joyces anger overcame his financial worries and he self-published this broadside in Trieste and sent copies to his brother Charles in Dublin for free distribution to his friends (and enemies) there. II. The work itself By leaning on the theoretical critical data of Aristote and Saint Thomas of Aquin, and basing his reflection on the relationship of the writer in his object, Joyce establishes a distinction between the diverse literary genres. In the lyric kind, the author and her double (his literary image) are in immediate relation; in the epic kind, the author presents his double by means of a mediation; in the dramatic kind, the double of the author appears in immediate relation with the others. It is remarkable that this progress finds itself in Joyces successive productions. The shout becomes a cadence in Chamber music, and People of Dublin is the articulation of a consciousness before any emotional. Dedalus emerges from the lyric mode of Stephen the hero. The passage of the staff in the epic takes place with Ulysses, where the emotional center of gravity is equidistant between the very artist and others. Gas from burner follows the same model as people of Dublin. The character of personal experience is marked by the use of the first person, means that selects and already organizes the elements that form Joyces realism . This pamphlet reports an initiation into the city of Dublin, during which he dashes a quest, meets the disappointment. His fascination for the words as a train is straightaway said to us. The words are not idle; they are capable of  «Ã‚  witchcraft  Ã‚ ». III. Influence of the work James Joyce had augured that his enigmatic texts would feed centuries during interpretations and experts quarrels IV. Critical review In 1915, the war forces him and his family to a new exile after eleven years spent in Trieste. Zurich, harbor for expatriates, welcomes them after a commitment of neutrality was taken with the Austrian authorities. With Ulysses’ housing start, it is the beginning of the big period of Joyces production. Chamber music was already published, People of Dublin is ended, and Stephen the hero took the definitive shape of Dedalus. According to his own expression, Joyce is above the fray. At the end of the war, Joyce’s family goes back to Trieste before joining Paris in 1920, where Joyce confronts himself at the entire Europe and America literary persons: Proust, Larbaud, Wyndham Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Pound and Eliot, but none of these writers seems to influence his project. In 1922, Ulysses is published. The fame of his author is produced as well as his detractors and his adulators; comments and contradictory interpretations also contribute to it. So as it’s seen Valery Larbaud assimilating Joyce to Rabelais, while making of Ulysses a human comedy . However, this fame exceeds hardly the circle of initiated, even if it is vast. If Ulysses causes the admiration of Eliot and Hemingway, for Virginia Woolf it is the work of a boor, and Gertrude Stein sees only an intervention in his own experiences of writing there. Paul Claudel, Andre Gide and George Moore line up among his enemies. However, Joyce shook the literary consciousness of moment. But Joyce has already begun to collect the materials of Finnegans Wake, and enthusiastically, while being amazed at the finds himself, that he is going to go  «Ã‚  at the end of English  Ã‚ »   Ã‚  Ã‚  The life continues, often printed by melancholy, shared between the difficulties of publication, the worldly successes without big reality, the mental instability of his daughter Lucia, its worsening eyesight more and more, the drink, but also one obstinate labour that must result in a world history. Finnegans Wake is ended in 1939. The literary critics are taken by surprise: probably a big book , the most colossal hoax since the Ossian de Macpherson . The Second World War bursts, and, not without any trouble, the Joyce family joins Zurich, where James Joyce dies on January 13th, 1941 following the operation of a drilled duodenal ulcer.