Radford University Study Abroad Program
Dr. Jolanta Wawrzycka
European Literary Trails
Bliss Mulligan's Web Site 2003

Joyce's Dublin

    James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882 in Dublin. Joyce began his schooling at Clongowes Wood College until the age of six where he then attended Belvedere College and University College in Dublin. Joyce became intolerant of the curriculum at his college and the strict Roman Catholic orthodoxy that controlled it. In 1902 he left his family and went to Paris to study medicine. After a year in Paris Joyce returned to Ireland to visit his dying mother. It is said that he refused to kneel in prayer beside her bed because of his strong feelings against Roman Catholicism. In 1904 Joyce met Nora Barnacle and fell in love. Nora became "the model for all his principal female characters." ( Maddox, Introduction in Dubliners) Joyce and Nora did not get married until 1931 because he had rejected the institution of marriage about the same time he rejected the Roman Catholic Church. James Joyce is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His most famous works include Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Dubliners.

Dubliners "is a look back in anger. Joyce portrays his countrymen as drunks, cheats, child batterers, boasters, gossips, and schemers: failures all, people who cannot take the chances life offers them and who, as in 'Araby,' prevent young from taking theirs. His summary judgement of Ireland appears as a word on the very first page of Dubliners: paralysis." (Maddox, Introduction in Dubliners)

I have read both Dubliners and A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Dubliners is definitely an easier read than Portrait. Dubliners consists of fifteen short stories that are set in Dublin. Joyce mentions actual places in and around Dublin which was neat because we were actually able to visit the places that we had read about and where different characters in the stories had been.

~

While walking around in Dublin we went past Belvedere College where Joyce attended school. We also went to the James Joyce Center. The James Joyce Center is in an old Georgian Home that has been renovated and looks the way it did in the time of Joyce. The James Joyce Center is actually run by the Joyce family. While we were in the James Joyce Center we watched the film FAITHFUL DEPARTED to see what Dublin was like in 1900s, we listened to Joyce reading Finnegans Wake, and we saw photographs of the people  Joyce wrote about.