LIFE:

He studies in the prestigious Jesuit College Clongowes Wood College and then, for the disastrous economic conditions of his family, in the Belvedere College. In 1898 he enrols the University College of Dublin and in these years he begins to manifest a nonconformist and rebel behaviour. He defends with articles and lectures the theatre of Ibsen, considered at those times immoral and subversive. He publishes the day of herd, a pamphlet where he rails at provincialism of the Irish culture.
After having taken an art degree he enters medicine university and he moves to Paris in order to study at the Sorbonne but he must soon return to Dublin for the death of his mother. In 1904 he writes the autobiographic essay A Portrait of the Artist that he later decides to transform in the novel Stephen Hero: this will constitute the central nucleus of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He also composes many poems later collected in Chamber Music.
On the newspaper "Irish Homestead" three stories comprised in Dubliners are published. He meets Nora Barnacle, who is coming from the West of Ireland to work as maid in Dublin, and she will be his companion for the rest of his life.
He moves with his friend, the writer Oliver St. John Gogarty, (the one who will then be represented like Buck Mulligan in the Ulysses) in the Martello tower in Sandycove but he remains only one week. He leaves Ireland to go with Nora to Zurich, then Pola and finally Trieste. Here he works as teacher of English at the Berlitz School. In a long vacation to Rome he works as foreign correspondent of a bank and he plans, without beginning to write it, a story of Dublin's life, first germ of Ulysses.
Returned to Trieste becomes part of the cultural environment, and he becomes friend of Italo Svevo teaching him English and collaborating with the newspaper "Il piccolo della Sera" and give lectures on Irish topics. In 1907 the poetry collection Chamber Music is published in London. Between 1911 and 1914 writes a short poem in prose, block notes for his greater works, that will be published posthumous with the title of Giacomo Joyce; it is his only work that is not set in Dublin but in Italy. Returned to Dublin he tries the business of opening a cinema but it fails. He tries to publish Dubliners but he still obtains rejections. Disappointed and disconsolate in 1912 he leaves Ireland and he will never come back.
In 1913 he works to the revision of the Portrait and meets Ezra Pound and he shows him some stories provoking the interest of the American poet. Dubliners is finally published and on the London newspaper "The Egoist" begins to be issued serially Dedalus.
With a new rush of enthusiasm he begins the drawing up of Ulysses that the "Little public Review" from New York starts publishing from 1918 and writes the drama Exiles staged in 1919 in Munich with failure. During the war he moves to Zurich and obtains a subsidy from the British Royal Literary Fund. In 1920 on Pound's advice he moves to Paris where in 1922 Sylvia Beach publishes Ulysses that in United States will only come out in 1934 after having been acquitted from the accusation of Pornography.
From 1923 he begins to write Work in Progress that will appear 16 years later with the title of Finnegans Wake. In 1927 the Poems Penyeach are published.
A serious eyes disease that for some periods makes him nearly blind, forces hi, to many surgeries. He frequently travels to England, Switzerland and Germany. Fragments of Finnegans Wake are published by literary magazines on the cutting edge provoking uncertain and polemical opinions. The first mental disturbs of his daughter begin to manifest, but Joyce always wants to look after her, leaving her in clinical only during the more violent crisis.
In 1939 Finnegans Wake is published and after beginning of the war Joyce moves to Zurich where he will die later in surgery.

SUGGESTED WORKS:

Dubliners, 1914
15 short stories set in Dublin, a city and its inhabitants described with terms of mercy and with a scrupulous style of meanness that does not escape from sentimental accents. With a meticulous prose that gives voice to the frustrations of the main characters these stories are presented with an organic design: the first three are dedicate to childhood, then, gradually, four to adolescence and four to the maturity; in the last four gives testimony of the public life of Dublin, dominated by disappointments and inability to act, therefore justifying, implicitly, the voluntary exile.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1917
Autobiographic novel anchored to the nineteenth-century models of literature in which but he inaugurates new literary forms and styles. It tells the process itself to become an artist, inquired and represented since childhood years. In the last chapter, in a diary form, leaving Ireland the main character will say: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race".

Ulysses, 1922
It's his undisputed masterpiece and one of the fundamental books of the modern literature; here he destroys the traditional co-ordinates of time and space and introduces an incomparable stylistic complexity. He tries to revive peregrinations of the Homeric Ulysses in a single day (16 June 1904, when Joyce met Nora and that it's today celebrated in Dublin as Bloomsday) of the life of advertising agent Leopold Bloom, a nonentity Hebrew-Irish. The episodes, the scenes and the facts are constructed with more or less clear parallelism regarding the Homeric epic. In the creation of these personages Joyce was really inspired by people from Dublin who really existed (In Dublin, at the James Joyce Cultural Centre, you can read biographies of some fifty of these personages).

OTHER WORKS:

Chamber Music, 1907
36 poems with a strong decadent mark. The topics are those of love, of feminine beauty, betrayal and melancholy. The style is simple, thoughtful to rhythm, musicality of verses and harmony of images.

Exiles, 1918
Youth job, connected to his spiritual autobiography and to the concrete events of his life; strongly influenced by the theatre of Ibsen discusses the topics of relationship between husband and wife connected to the presence of another man.

Finnegans Wake 1939
Unfinished Work gives, still more of Ulysses, an impression of rarefaction and chaos telling the restless Saturday night of Humphrey Climpden Earwicker, fifty years old inn-keeper of Scandinavian origin. Influenced by the theory of the corsi e ricorsi by G.B. Vico that forms the true carrying structure. Universal symbols and myths cohabit with the representation of events of the contemporary situation. The language sets aside every normal communicative attempt in order to transform itself in an evocative protean magma.

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