James Joyce

1882-1941

James Joyce He is considered the greatest master of

languages since Milton. At age twenty, Joyce left Ireland for Paris,

rebelling against his homeland and rejecting all values which he had brought up to adhere to.

Before leaving Ireland, he began one of his best known works Dubliners, a collection of short stories about Dublin life.

James Joyce With rapidly deteriorating eyesight, Joyce sought to

leave a lasting impression upon the literary world. His work Ulysses, modeled after Homer’s Odyssey, is

often considered his greatest work. It includes Joyce’s distinct style of delivery, made-up words,

allusions, extended use of puns, and symbollic paralellism. Because of its immoral content, however, over one thousand

copies of Ulysses were confiscated and burned by both the USPS and British Customs.

His last work Finnegans Wake, took seventeen years to complete. It even surpasses Ulysses in its extravagant narrative delivery. In it, Joyce employs stream of consciousness (interior

monologue technique which involves the delving into the operation of the human mind in a waking or dreaming state.)