Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing

by James Joyce, Kevin Barry (Editor)

A unique anthology of Joyce's non-fictional writings, this volume addresses diverse issues such as aesthetics, the functions of the press, censorship, Irish cultural history, English literature and Empire. The collection includes newspaper articles, reviews, lectures and essays, and covers 40 years of Joyce's life. These pieces also clarify and illuminate the transformations in Joyce's fiction, from Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the first drafts of Ulysses. Gathering together more than fifty essays, several of which have never been available in an English edition, this is the most complete and the most helpfully annotated collection.

Genres: Nonfiction, Ireland, Essays, Classics, Politics, Irish Literature, Literary Criticism

416 pages, Paperback

First published March 21, 2002

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

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Joyce wrote some terrible drivel and it is collected here for those, like myself, keen to understand his development as a writer. It opens with some God-awful twaddle such as The Study of Languages or Drama and Life, suggesting nothing so much as a despairing attempt to earn a few shillings by aping the writing style of a provincial newspaper’s theatre pages, including all of their social prejudices; it incorporates quite a few conventionally nationalistic essays on contemporary Irish politics in the decades before 1916 and there are several anecdotal and arguably stage Oirish descriptions of Galway and the Aran Islands.

There is a pleasing irony in reading a young Joyce write, unselfconsciously I suppose: “It would be interesting to hear an appreciation of Dickens written, so to speak, at a proper focus from the original by writers of his own class and of a like (if somewhat lesser) stature.” Many writers are awesome critics – I think of poets like Heaney, Muldoon or Walcott, intimidating people capable of replicating the Book of Kells on a napkin – but apart from his first essay on Ibsen, which I did enjoy, I really did not feel impressed with Joyce’s remarks on Defoe or Dickens and his several accolades to James Clarence Mangan just bemused me, albeit I have only a half dozen of Mangan’s poems to assess him with. His remarks on Oscar Wilde were unattractive and without doubt today’s social justice warriors, anachronistically censoring the literary influences of our rising generation, will need persuading that Joyce can be redeemed, for he was clearly submerged as a young man in the conventional social values of that period and place.

There are premonitions of the work he would produce. These are blatant in his short article on foot and mouth disease, which finds a place in Ulysses, and several curious pages written in 1932 in recognition of a singer of the time which anticipate the style of Finnegans Wake. Both Dubliners and Ulysses also incorporate his political commentaries. It is worth saying that copious notes by the editor, Kevin Barry, greatly assist the reader.

More importantly, for me at least, these unsuccessful and over-laboured essays cast a light on the way Joyce wrote. In Dubliners we still have the determination to write well, to excel, to master the form; of course, he succeeds brilliantly, especially in The Dead. It’s as though he adhered to Blake’s adage – a fool would become wise if he was only consistent in his foolishness. But in Ulysses, in my opinion, Joyce found his voice, stopped trying to write like a genius and started to write brilliantly about people who are unexceptional and mortal. Of course he enjoyed description and included many exhilarating passages but if he did insert anything pompous or pretentious it was generally intended to be deflated. He represented himself as a fallible young man struggling with big ideas, and often failing; in Ulysses he often mocks himself. But also, he emerged from the conventional bigotry of his generation with both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom negating settler colonialism, narrow nationalism and antisemitism among other themes. He did not become a warrior for social justice but an advocate for decency and humanity. I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy. Then in Finnegans Wake a different order of big words proliferated and made him very happy indeed because by then he had left far behind him the need to ape anybody or to be approved of by anybody at all.

There is no need to demonstrate the enormous value and impact of Joyce’s writing. But not these particular writings. They are of great interest biographically but have almost no intrinsic interest whatsoever. They are painfully poor. Then again, if James Joyce wrote them, who would dare not to read them? I'll be giving them five stars, obvs.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look into the journalism and academic writing of Joyce, which traces delightfully the author's progression in his aesthetic journey. A collection such as this would be expected to be dry in places, and whilst not every page is a joy to read, some texts slog, especially where original manuscript pages are missing.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oxford World Classics hits it out of the park again with this edition.
About 216 pp of material in English (emphasis on "occasional"!), 70 pp of pieces in their original Italian (I did not know Joyce wanted to put together a book of pieces included here that dealt with "the Irish question", to be published in their original Italian), 40 pp of Intro and bibliographic material, and 60 pp of excellent Notes.
Editor Kevin Barry does an outstanding job giving us the bibliographic source and history of each piece. Also, he ties ideas, events and people from here to appearances in Joyce's fictional works. And most of all, he explains the complicated Irish political history and situation of each piece well!
The mostly short essays here tend to be redundant at times, and, as Barry points out in his Notes, Joyce often plagiarizes other works (especially for the literary pieces). Still, of some interest, and not a hard read (this is not French Post-modernist literary criticism!).
Probably for Joyce completists only, or could be helpful if you are taking a class just on Joyce.
Slow going at first, but picks up.

[Mert Dostol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bazı yazıları edebiyat dışı konularda, bazıları da bir kitap hakkında, ya da o kitapların önsözü niteliğinde. Bunun dışında değerli edebiyat eleştirisi yazıları ve İrlanda kültürü ve tarihi hakkında yazıları var. Bu yazıları öğretici ve bazılarını defalarca okudum, diğer yazılarını okumadan geçmek istemediğim için okudum ve kendim için ilgi çekici şeyler bulamadım.

[Dylan Rock · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of James Joyce's critical and political writings offers an fantastic insight into his over the period which he wrote his early word such as "The Dubliners", A "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" and "Ulysses"

[Josh Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hodgepodge of different styles and genres, though mostly political journalism and literary criticism. The latter were easier to understand without a really in depth knowledge of 1890's-1910's Irish politics. My favorite pieces were "the study of languages" and "Ireland; land of saints and sages."