The value of James Joyce / Margot Norris, University of California, Irvine.

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Material type: Text

TextLanguage: English Publication details: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2016.Description: 157 pages ; 22 cmISBN:

9781107131927 (hardback)
9781107583160 (paperback)

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

823.912 23 NOR

Other classification:

LIT004120

Online resources:

Cover image

Contents:

1. Introduction: Democratic and Cosmopolitan Joyce 2. The significance of the ordinary : in Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses 3. Irish Nature, Irish City: The complexities of place 4. Joyce's Cultures, and Classical and the Popular 5.The Styles of Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake: Moods, voices, and language.

Summary: "Richard Ellmann said it best: "Joyce's discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is the extraordinary." How so? Is there anything extraordinary about depicting a man going to the outhouse in the morning and defecating, pleased to find "that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone" (4.508)? Surely the act is commonplace enough, but its depiction in a 1904 novel, complete with the quiet thoughts that accompany it, is not. It suggests that even the most insignificant moments of a day can have meaning to human beings, and their representation in literature sharpens its realism to an extraordinary degree. In a 1920 letter to Carlo Linati, Joyce called Ulysses "the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)." The representation of the ordinary thereby becomes one of the most important elements of Joyce's democratic impulse"--

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Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode
General Books	CUTN Central Library Literature	Non-fiction	823.912 NOR (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Available		36756

1. Introduction: Democratic and Cosmopolitan Joyce
2. The significance of the ordinary : in Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses
3. Irish Nature, Irish City: The complexities of place
4. Joyce's Cultures, and Classical and the Popular
5.The Styles of Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake: Moods, voices, and language.

"Richard Ellmann said it best: "Joyce's discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is the extraordinary." How so? Is there anything extraordinary about depicting a man going to the outhouse in the morning and defecating, pleased to find "that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone" (4.508)? Surely the act is commonplace enough, but its depiction in a 1904 novel, complete with the quiet thoughts that accompany it, is not. It suggests that even the most insignificant moments of a day can have meaning to human beings, and their representation in literature sharpens its realism to an extraordinary degree. In a 1920 letter to Carlo Linati, Joyce called Ulysses "the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)." The representation of the ordinary thereby becomes one of the most important elements of Joyce's democratic impulse"--

Includes bibliographical references (pages 147-153) and index.

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