Reading Notes Week 12 Part B

Reading Notes 

Week 12 

Part B

• James Joyce helped shape modern literature by conducting experiments with the narrative form to begin a new literature movement that in the end would become popular during the twentieth century. 
• Joyce with the help from Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf the group helped followers of literature to understand the mind. 
•  Joyce came from a big family of about ten children and another three who died as infants but he was the eldest surviving child. 
• A theme I see with a lot of these english literature writers who helped changed history they come from wealthy family 's most of the time when the introduction tells the back story of the writers life. Basically like education is the same now too then because more money better schools and better opportunities. 
• The text says for Joyce to support that large family " His father held a well paid and and undemanding post in the civil service and the family was comfortable until 1891" His father end up losing his job in 1891 and he refused to get another job and decided to live off a small pension. 
• Going from well paid to no work Joyce's family began to drop down the economic ladder and his dad which became what he described as " a praiser of his past, a drunk, tax gatherer, and a bankrupt"pg. 174 
• From this description I can tell that Joyce wasn't happy even at his young age of his dad just giving up on living well-paid to live where you barley have anything. Also what could have sparked this frustration is since his father lost his job at the age of nine Joyce was taken out of his well known Catholic prep school because they could not afford his tuition anymore. 
• Joyce proving that he was meant to be chosen to be read in this history book today, let two years past and Joyce was admitted into another rigorous well know Belvedere College in Dublin on a scholarship furthering that education.
• I appreciate Joyce's life story and his never give attitude where he is presented with a problem but instead chooses to run right around the challenges with a fight about himself.  
• Also his story "The Dead" has an interesting concept saying being a "dream of a better life against a dismal improvised background and since it was fiction but had so much realism incorporated this became a new wave.