James Joyce critical quotes

Question 1

Martin Macguinness

POTA and self-formation

Answer 1

‘Portrait presents a story of self- discovery through rejection’ [of all external societal forces]
‘Stories are, of course, part of a socialising process and transmit the values or beliefs a society hold dear… But in Portrait this time-honoured framework is broken, and therein lies the irony. Here the artist has nothing to tell us about the world, no little gem of wisdom to pass on. He is too busy trying to put the world together for himself’

Question 2

Anthony Birrell

Answer 2

‘It is his rejection of his place in a soical group….that is his supreme sacrilege as a novelist…he refused to suffer the first travails of a novelist, the agony of sensitivity’
‘For with the rejection of the cultural group there goes, in Joyce, a rejection, or subjection, of the moral sense’

Question 3

Richard Brown

[Ulysses and Religion]

Answer 3

Notes ‘Joyce’s distaste for the strong racial stereotypings of contemporary irish nationalism…[sympathises with] Jews as intrinsic social marginals within Christian society and as carriers of an alternative pre- or non-Christian humanity’

Question 4

Martin Macguiiness - the ordinary

Answer 4

‘‘‘Joyce is really commenting upon the dishonest creation of art, and showing how the daily bread of our existence is often transformed by force of tradition into a sweet insipid cake. For Joyce, the eucharist of reality was the material the artist had to celebrate…farts and all’

Question 5

James Joyce on Ulysses

Answer 5

“a kind of encylopaedia”

Question 6

Hedwig Schwall

Answer 6

Suggests Steven Dedalus is a ‘healthy hysteric’; ‘The hysteric can have a strong sense of responsibility, but he differs from the non-hysterical, narcissistic person in that he feels responsibility only to himself. The hysteric will not seek anyone else’s counsel, whereas ‘normal’ people accept an authority beyond their own comprehension’
Hence his ability to go against his religion

Question 7

Virginia Woolf on Joyce

Answer 7

‘Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain…life itself’

Question 8

DH Lawrence on Joyce

Answer 8

‘’ My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest… what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new’

Question 9

What did James Joyce change between Steven Hero and POTA?

Answer 9

Steven’s last name was spelled Daedelus suggesting a more exact allusion to the Greek myth; what is the importance of its revision and shortening to Dedalus in POTA and subsequent works?

Question 10

Anthony Birrell - morality

Answer 10

‘In criticism of Joyce a moral judgement is the only judgement because a technical judgement is not only irrelevant, it is misleading’

Question 11

Mark MacGurl - on modernism in general but applicable to Joyce

Answer 11

Importance of reflexivity for poetic self-production, which he calls “routine autopoeisis” – ‘the portrait of the artist is not only an important single book and an important genre, but also a name for one of the routine operations of literary modernism. For the modernist artist, that is, the reflexive production of the ‘modernist artist’ – i.e., job description itself – is a large part of the job”