James Joyce Flashcards
Harry Levin
Romantic interest in Joyce’s recollection/ interiority
Overview
Stephen Deadlus, growing up in Ireland in the 19th Century
attends a strict religious boarding school called Clongowes Wood College
family sinks into debt and they move to Dublin
it is then that Stephen discovers the church
realises he is not meant for the priesthood and decides to enter academia and a life of artistic freedom
Joyce
‘[I]dealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off.’
subjectivity/lang reflecting age
‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road’
‘ His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.’
when he is beaten at school, the punctuation disappears ‘it was unclear and cruel’
the bird girl/ epiphany
‘A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird.’
‘Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.’
Irishness
‘No honourable and sincere man… has given up to you [Ireland] his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another’
‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.’
‘Ireland is the old sow that eats her furrow’
language
‘The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine.’
‘though there were all different names for God in all the different languages in the world […] God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God’.
Stephen’s name/ the ending
‘Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy’
‘I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can’
one of the children asks him ‘What sort of a name is that?’
stream of conciousness
‘He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool.He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of.’
religion
‘He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool.He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of.’
Christopher Butler
‘He documents his version of this intellectual revolt, amongst students ‘who regarded art as a continental vice’ (SH 38/34), most explicitly in Stephen Hero and A Portrait, which show how he extricated himself from the prevailing faiths of his contemporaries. But this rejection of religion and nationalism is not I think the most important part of the story concerning Joyce’s turn-of-the-century scepticism. For it also resides, paradoxically enough, in his extraordinary attachment to fact.’
John Paul Riquelme
influenced by Oscar Wilde
Irishness of the book and art for art’s sake mentality
