The Critical Writings of James Joyce

by James Joyce, Guy Davenport (Foreword), Ellsworth Mason (Editor)

Book by James Joyce

Genres: Essays, Literary Criticism, Ireland, Philosophy, Literature, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 1964

About the author

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his pioneering mastery and popularization of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin in 1882, Joyce spent the majority of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe—living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris—yet his entire, meticulous body of work remained obsessively and comprehensively focused on the minutiae of his native city, making Dublin both the meticulously detailed setting and a central, inescapable character in his literary universe. His work is consistently characterized by its technical complexity, rich literary allusion, intricate symbolism, and an unflinching examination of the spectrum of human consciousness. Joyce began his published career with Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories offering a naturalistic, often stark, depiction of middle-class Irish life and the moral and spiritual paralysis he observed in its inhabitants, concluding each story with a moment of crucial, sudden self-understanding he termed an "epiphany." This collection was followed by the highly autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a Bildungsroman that meticulously chronicled the intellectual and artistic awakening of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who would become Joyce's recurring alter ego and intellectual stand-in throughout his major works.
His magnum opus, Ulysses (1922), is universally regarded as a landmark work of fiction that fundamentally revolutionized the novel form. It compressed the events of a single, ordinary day—June 16, 1904, a date now globally celebrated by literary enthusiasts as "Bloomsday"—into a sprawling, epic narrative that structurally and symbolically paralleled Homer's Odyssey, using a dazzling array of distinct styles and linguistic invention across its eighteen episodes to explore the lives of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus in hyper-minute detail. The novel's explicit content and innovative, challenging structure led to its initial banning for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom, turning Joyce into a cause célèbre for artistic freedom and the boundaries of literary expression. His final, most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed the boundaries of language and conventional narrative even further, employing a dense, dream-like prose filled with multilingual puns, invented portmanteau words, and layered allusions that continues to divide and challenge readers and scholars to this day. A dedicated polyglot who reportedly learned several languages, including Norwegian simply to read Ibsen in the original, Joyce approached the English language not as a fixed entity with rigid rules, but as a malleable medium capable of infinite reinvention and expression. His personal life was marked by an unwavering dedication to his literary craft, a complex, devoted relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle, and chronic, debilitating eye problems that necessitated numerous painful surgeries throughout his life, sometimes forcing him to write with crayons on large white paper. Despite these severe physical ailments and financial struggles, his singular literary vision remained sharp, focused, and profoundly revolutionary. Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, shortly after undergoing one of his many eye operations. Today, he is widely regarded as perhaps the most significant and challenging writer of the 20th century. His immense, complex legacy is robustly maintained by global academic study and institutions such as the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which ensures his complex, demanding, and utterly brilliant work endures, inviting new generations of readers to explore the very essence of what it means to be hum

Reviews

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first thing to know about this book is that its title is deceptive. A collection of 57 essays written by James Joyce between c1896 and 1937, it's not so much "critically-important" reading for Joyceans, but Joyce engaged in writing critiques and critical essays. But is it essential reading for Joycean completists? Inasmuch as anyone who gets as far into Joyce as Ulysses generally becomes a completist (excepting some few who are scholastically-compelled to read it), the answer is probably yes. That doesn't mean you'll find yourself returning often to this book, even if you happen to be a professor who specializes in this author.

These essays are something of a mixed bag. You can certainly trace flashes of the evolution of Joyce's critical thinking here, from childhood on. This is a matter of interest, of course: we garner new insights from a direction external to his fiction. Some of the journalism he produced which is reprinted here is so topical that it's hard to relate to it now, and it's probably not worth the amount of legwork that would be required to do so. Likewise for many of his book reviews of now forgotten works, and which he usually panned: no need to exhume those sub-literary corpses.

Still, there are occasional gems to be unearthed from the surrounding clayey strata. Joyce's early preoccupation with the drama of the stage and his relegation of fiction to second-class status is made abundantly clear. We start getting to the "good stuff," specifically to the "Aesthetics" section (1903/04), about half way through. Here we're given access to entries from his Paris and Pola Notebooks in which he originally set down his aesthetic theory, featured prominently especially in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (There are some distinctions, but in truth most of this is laid out in that novel and is probably more readily digested there.) In 1907's "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," we begin to understand (as if we didn't know already from his fiction) just how deep Joyce's knowledge of Irish history and society extended. Later, some of his suggestions about Fenianism suggest we might revise our assumptions about Joyce's celebrated pacifism; at a minimum we must conclude that Joyce-the-man was more complex than Joyce-the-myth. As of course every person is. "From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer," from 1932, is rather fascinating, as it is written in a style which might be dubbed Finnegans Wake-lite: a charming piece which by any other author's standards hardly constitutes "lite" reading at all.

If you are a Joycean completist, and if you've bothered looking at this review then I'm sure you are, by all means you'll want this book. You'll probably be surprised to discover, even despite my review here, that it won't be what you'd imagined it would be.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In addition to his articles for an Irish newspaper and his lectures on Irish literature, this book includes a fuller version of Joyce’s aesthetic theories than what is included in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Acquired 1992
Think I got this one at Paragraphe, Montreal, Quebec

[Kevin Hinman · Rating 2 out of 5]

With any author you love, especially if they're deceased, you're eventually going to hit that point when you've read all of their great works. After that, try as hard as you may to convince yourself otherwise, you're just clawing for scraps. There's not much more than scraps in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, the hodge-podge of essays, reviews and transcribed lectures that account for most of Joyce's non-fiction work. Sure, you may get a glimpse of that Finnegans Wake glory in "From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer" (by far the best piece of the bunch), or peer into the genesis of angsty young Stephen Dedalus's philosophies in "Aesthetics," or prime yourself for the barrage of Irish political references in Ulysses with "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," but really, only about 20 pages out of 300 in The Critical Writings are truly exceptional. Other pieces, such as Joyce's overviews of William Blake or Oscar Wilde, are interesting enough, though nothing revolutionary. The rest are a slog to get through.

Oh well, we'll always have Phoenix Park.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Drama And Life" is a must read. Most of the other pieces (reviews written for cash, etc.) are interesting (like, duh-- they're by James Joyce) but only to be recommended to JJ completists.

[James Dempsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fenianism
Home Rule comes of Age
Aristotle on Education
Learning Languages
Ireland at the Bar