James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882 – January 13, 1941) was an expatriate Irish writer and poet, widely considered a significant writer of the 20th century. He is best known for his short story collection Dubliners (1914), and his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Legacy

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Joyce was forced to leave Paris and eventually returned to Zurich, where he died at the age of 58. He is buried in the Fluntern Cemetery in that city, together with Nora, whom he had married in London in 1931.

Related Topics:
Second World War - Fluntern Cemetery - 1931

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Joyce's work has been subject to intense scrutiny by scholars of all types. He has also been an important influence on writers as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, and many more.

Related Topics:
Samuel Beckett - Jorge Luis Borges - Flann O'Brien - Máirtín Ó Cadhain - Salman Rushdie - Thomas Pynchon - William Burroughs

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Joyce's influence is also evident in fields other than literature. The phrase "Three Quarks for Muster Mark" in Joyce's Finnegans Wake is often called the source of the physicists' word "quark", the name of one of the main kinds of elementary particles, proposed by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann. (James Gleick's book Genius notes that Gell-Mann may have found the Joycean antecedent after the fact; as Gleick observes, physicists have pronounced quark to rhyme with cork and not with Mark.) The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has written a book on the use of language in Ulysses, and the American philosopher Donald Davidson has written similarly on Finnegans Wake in comparison with Lewis Carroll. Vladimir Nabokov esteemed Ulysses greatly, listing it with Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" as one of the 20th century's greatest prose works. However, Nabokov was less than thrilled with Finnegans Wake (see Strong Opinions, The Annotated Lolita or Pale Fire), an attitude which Jorge Luis Borges shared.

Related Topics:
Quark - Elementary particle - Murray Gell-Mann - James Gleick - Jacques Derrida - Donald Davidson - Lewis Carroll - Vladimir Nabokov - Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis - 20th century - Strong Opinions - The Annotated Lolita - Pale Fire - Jorge Luis Borges

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Finnegans Wake is a recurring theme in Tom Robbins's novel Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. In that novel, it is the favourite discussion topic of the Bangkok-based "C.R.A.F.T. Club" (Can't Remember A Fucking Thing). The protagonist, a CIA agent named Switters, contemplates writing a thesis about it.

Related Topics:
Tom Robbins - Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates - Bangkok - Fuck - CIA

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The life of Joyce is celebrated annually on June 16, Bloomsday, in Dublin and in an increasing number of cities worldwide.

Related Topics:
June 16 - Bloomsday - Dublin

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