Page 1 About the Author
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish writer and poet, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, one of the founders of postmodern literature, whose works and "stream of consciousness" ideas have had a great influence on the world literary scene.
James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 in Dublin, Ireland. His father had a strong belief in nationalism and his mother was a devout Catholic. When Joyce was born, ireland, a beautiful island nation, was a British colony, with constant wars and troubles. He had a large group of younger siblings, but his father favored the talented eldest son, "whether the family had enough to eat, and gave him money to buy foreign books." He grew up at the Catholic Church School at Crogoise Forest College in Sarins, Kiddell County, with the principal being Father Comey, president of the Catholic Jesuit Church. Joyce was the youngest of the students. Outstanding academic performance and initial display of extraordinary literary talent.
Since the nineteenth century, the Irish Renaissance movement centered on Yeats, Mrs Gregory and Singh has formed in Dublin, and James Joyce has been directly and indirectly affected. Through friends, he was also influenced by the Irish National Independence Movement. What gave him an even stronger influence, however, was the free thought that appeared in European literature at the end of the nineteenth century. Before graduating from high school, he became suspicious of religious beliefs.
In June 1902, Joyce graduated from University College Dublin with a bachelor's degree in modern languages. On 2 October, he registered for the Faculty of Medicine of St. Cecilia. However, I only studied here until the beginning of November and gave up my studies due to financial difficulties.
James Joyce began writing the novel Portrait of a Young Artist in Dublin in 1908, which was completed in Trieste, Italy, in 1914 and lasted 10 years. The novel "Portrait of a Young Artist" has a strong autobiographical color, and Joyce actually raises the issue of the artist's relationship with society and life through the story of Stephen Didalus, and interestingly reveals the fact that Stephen Didalus himself is precisely the world of Dublin that he tried to escape, and Dublin invisibly retaliated against the rebellious young artists.
The 1922 novel Ulysses borrows the framework of the ancient Greek epic Odysseus, comparing Bloom's wanderings in Dublin for 18 hours a day to the Greek epic hero Ulysses's 10 years of sea wandering, giving Ulysses a generalization of modern epics. Through the life of these three people in one day, the novel vividly expresses their entire history, all their spiritual life and inner world.
James Joyce spent his life in turmoil, traveling around Europe, teaching English and writing to make ends meet, and in his later years he suffered from eye diseases and nearly went blind. On January 10, 1941, he was hospitalized for abdominal spasms, identified as a perforation of duodenal ulcer, and died in the early morning of the thirteenth day at the age of 59. He was buried on the fifteenth day at the Frintillon cemetery in Zurich.
Page 2 Reader's Comments
1. "Ulysses" takes the mundane trivialities of daily life as the theme of stream of consciousness, and there is no heroic achievement to sing and cry in the meantime. "There were no major events, no important people, no important thoughts." Joyce's modernity may be reflected here. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, he had already proved through his own practice of stream-of-consciousness fiction that only everyday life was the real realm of artistic creation. Only stream-of-consciousness depictions can find the truth of life.
2. Ulysses uses a well-established stream-of-consciousness technique. Stream-of-consciousness, i.e., "uncensored, irrationally controlled, or illogically arranged" mental activity that precedes the rational level, is a true record of free association. Joyce vigorously developed this technique, thus making an in-depth exploration of the inner self of man who is constantly changing.
3) The term "stream of consciousness" was first coined by the American philosopher and psychologist William James in the early 20th century, and was subsequently borrowed into the field of literature. Joyce's novel Ulysses is a masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
Page 3 Background of writing
After being invaded by the British in the early 12th century, Ireland was incorporated into the British territory in 1801 as the first colony of the British Empire. In the late period of the historically prosperous Stuart dynasty, only 24,000 of the 184,000 households in Ireland at that time owned one or more chimneys.
Three-quarters of Ireland's land is covered with wheat and other grains, but the people depend on potatoes to survive. In 1845, the famine lasted for two years due to a poor harvest caused by potato blight. As a result of starvation, illness or emigration to the Americas, ireland's population fell from more than 8 million to 6.5 million. The Irish people could not be enslaved, and various forms of resistance and armed uprisings arose one after another. They held high the banner of national independence, shed blood and sacrificed, and paid a heavy price. By 1922 the 26 counties of southern Ireland were self-governing, and in 1949 these 26 counties established a fully independent Republic of Ireland.
In Joyce's childhood, Ireland was still under British rule. He wrote Ulysses at the height of the Irish National Liberation Movement. As a result of the bloody repression of the colonizers and the contradictory struggle within the FNL, the national struggle in Ireland was repeatedly frustrated, and the far-sighted and beloved Parnell was attacked for personal problems and was forced to give up his leadership and died, causing the national independence movement to suffer great losses, which angered the young Joyce who supported Parnell.
This is one of the reasons why he went into exile as an adult due to disappointment. But in this unique historical process, the Irish people's strong national consciousness, stubborn and courageous national character, and the wave of national liberation movements that have been higher than the waves have been recognized by the world. The question of the national liberation of Ireland has also become a worldwide issue of concern to all mankind.
Joyce has been familiar with Greco-Roman mythology since he was 12 years old, and he longed for the story of Odysseus's return to his homeland after many hardships at sea. During the middle school entrance examination, Joyce wrote an essay on "Ulysses - My Favorite Hero" and won the Excellence Award. The story of Odysseus's sea adventures is always unforgettable.
The Adventures of Ulysses, published in 1808 by the British essayist Charles Lamb, gave Joyce the inspiration to create. In the preface to the book, Lamb writes: "In addition to man, the story of Ulysses includes the god of the sea, the witch, the giant, the witch, and so on. They symbolize the external strength of life and the temptation of the heart. These two-fold difficulties and obstacles are inevitable encounters by any wise and persevering person." This passage of Lamb's words can be said to be of crucial significance to Joyce's future conception of his monumental masterpiece.
Page 4 Summary of contents
Ulysses consists of three parts and eighteen chapters. The novel, in chronological order, describes the experiences of three ordinary Dubliners in Dublin on June 16, 1904, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. The story begins with three protagonists living in a ancient tower on the outskirts of Dublin.
A man named Stephen de Dillus, who had just graduated from a Parisian academy, was a young history teacher and poet. Stephen's mother asked him to kneel down and pray on his deathbed, and out of his antipathy to religion, he did not heed his mother's request. After Stephen's mother died, he regretted the matter for the rest of his life, always immersed in chagrin. Later, due to the family's downfall, Stephen almost broke off relations with his father, who led his sisters to a difficult life, and he ran away from home to teach for a living.
The second was named Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman, a Hungarian Jew. Bloom often walked the streets and alleys, running all day, but always worked hard and did not get anything. Bloom's young son died and left him mentally traumatized. Bloom's wife was ashamed of his infidelity to him.
The third is Bloom's wife, Morrie, who is a typical carnalist representative, who is unwilling to be lonely due to Bloom's declining sexual function, and often attracts bees and butterflies, all of which makes Bloom suffer unspeakable humiliation and mental torture.
In the early morning of June 16, 1904, after taking a history lesson, Stephen received a reward of three pounds and two shillings from the principal, and came to the seaside to stroll, facing the rolling waves, he had a thousand thoughts, the vicissitudes of the world, the mysteries of nature, the eternity of time and space, and the charm of art began to surge endlessly in his consciousness. He felt sorry for his father because he had had an erotic love affair with his mother. He felt guilty and longed to get a father again spiritually.
At eight o'clock in the morning of the same day, at a house on Ekard Street, Bloom, an advertising salesman, was preparing breakfast for himself and his wife, Morly. At this time, the messenger sent a letter to Mori, which was roughly a young man named Boylan who had agreed to come to see her at four o'clock in the afternoon. Bloom walked out of the house with a gloomy mood.
Bloom went to the post office to pick up a love letter written to him and read it in a secluded place. Then Bloom went to a friend's funeral. On Bloom's way to the cemetery, he saw his wife's lover, Poylan, walking in the direction of his home, and a series of thoughts flashed through his mind: death, burial, graveyard rats feeding on corpses, a series of absurd imaginations flowing in the depths of his soul.
Subsequently, Bloom went to the Freeman Daily to deliver an advertising pattern design, and then went to the hospital to visit a lady who was hospitalized due to dystocia. Here Bloom meets Stephen, and the two see each other, Stephen says that he will use his new salary to entertain guests, and they also go to the brothel. There Stephen was drunk and Bloom took good care of him. They finally found in each other what was most important to their spirits. Bloom finds his lost son and Stephen finds a spiritual father.
Bloom returns home and tells his wife, Stephen, that he will join their lives in the future. The debauched woman who betrayed her husband had just bid farewell to a lover, and had vaguely received a maternal satisfaction from Stephen's arrival, mixed with the erotic impulses of a young man. As she was about to fall asleep, she recalled the time when she and Bloom had fallen in love with each other. There seems to be a good turnaround in their lives.
The work does not positively depict the heroic deeds of being ordered to gallop on the battlefield and kill the enemy and insults at the time of the motherland's crisis, nor does it express the heroic ambition and pride of Jinge Iron Horse. However, based on his own unique experience and experience, with an objective perspective beyond the limitations of his own nation, the author stands on the side of the weak and humiliated peoples who have been insulted and damaged, and uses ingenious art forms, especially through the natural flow of consciousness of ordinary people in their daily lives, to describe the history and current situation of Ireland, expose the evils of colonial rule, and carry forward the spirit of national liberation.
Page 5 Quotes
1) History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up.
2. After a lifetime, he returned to the land where he was born. Growing up, he was an eyewitness to that place.
3. A broken heart. After all, it's just a pump, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day until one day it is blocked and it's over.
4, although worn down by time and weakened by fate, still struggle, explore, seek, and do not yield.
5 He walked briskly to the side; as he passed a wide ray of sunlight, his eyes came alive and took on a blue life.
(To be continued)
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