appunti su James Joyce, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica appunti su James Joyce e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, son of a talented but feckless father, who is accurately described in Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) as having been "a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax- gatherer, a bankrupt". > Joyce's primary education was Catholic. He attended Jesuit institutions and then he studied Modern Languages at University College in Dublin. At the age of sixteen, during his last year of school, Joyce began to regard himself as a rebel against the shabbiness and philistinism of Dublin. He also began to reject his Catholic faith in favour of a literary mission that he saw as involving rebellion and exile. > For Joyce, as for his character Stephen Dedalus (his alter-ego) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, being an artist or a writer necessarily implied a self-imposed state of exile. To preserve his integrity, to avoid involvement in popular causes (he always refused to play any part in the nationalist or other popular activities of his fellow students), to devote himself to the life of the artist, he felt that he had to go abroad. > He started to travel at 22. He was cosmopolitan and no land was his unique mother- land. Joyce went to Paris after graduation, but he was recalled to Dublin by his mother's fatal illness. In Dublin worked as schoolteacher, then returned to the Continent in 1904 to teach English in Trieste and then in Zurich. He took with him Nora Barnacle, a woman from Galway with no interest in literature. Her vivacity and wit charmed Joyce, and the two lived in devoted companionship until his death. 1905-1915: Trieste, Italy 1915-1920: Zurich, Switzerland 1920-1940: Paris, France 1940-41: Zurich. Joyce never saw the conclusion of World War II. Following an intestinal operation, he died at the age of 59. He is buried in Zurich. > Life was hard at first. In Trieste - where he was Italo Svevo's English teacher - Joyce had little money, he drunk heavily and begun to suffer from eye diseases: blind for brief periods, he underwent twenty-five operations. Between 1905-1907 Nora and James had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. The girl was a source of deep pain to her parents: later, in her early adolescence, she was affected by a serious mental disorder from which she would never recover. > Proud, obstinate, absolutely convinced of his genius, given to fits of sudden gaiety and of sudden silence, Joyce was not always an easy person to get along with, yet he never lacked friends, and throughout his thirty-six years on the Continent, he was always the centre of a literary circle. In spite of living and doing most of his writings in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, Joyce paradoxically wrote only and always about DUBLIN, about its atmosphere, its history, its cultural, political and religious context, its topography. He devised ways and strategies to expand his accounts of the Irish capital in literary microcosms of human history and experiences.  1914: he published "Dubliners" (completed in 1905 but published later), a collection of 15 SHORT STORIES all revolving around Dublin, its way of life and its inhabitants. Ezra Pound appreciated a lot Joyce's unconventional style. In spite of his exile from Ireland and Dublin, he set all his works in Ireland and mostly in DUBLIN. «DUBLINERS» is composed of 15 short stories in which Joyce portrays specific moments in the lives of people all living in DUBLIN. These stories are sharp, realistic sketches of what Joyce called the "paralysis". Though religion, politics and autobiographical concerns are treated in the 15 short stories, the most pervading theme is the theme of «PARALYSIS». Joyce: «My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin because this city seemed to me the centre of the paralysis». With the term «paralysis» Joyce is referring to: a paralysis of will, courage and self- esteem that leads people to live lives that suffocate them; this paralysis makes people accept limitations and sad compromises imposed by the social / religious / familiar context they have to live in. A sense of paralysis and stagnation runs through all the fifteen stories. Everyone in Dublin seems to be caught up in an endless web of despair. Even when they want to escape, Joyce's Dubliners are unable to because they are spiritually weak. Each story represents an instance of failure of self-realization.  1916: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", his semi-autobiographical novel, was published (also thanks to Ezra Pound's help). Although he had established himself as an appreciated writer by publishing "Dubliners" and "A Portrait..." his financial difficulties had not been solved. But in 1917 something changed: The English feminist and editor Harriet Shaw Weaver became his "anonymous benefactor": she not only subsidized him generously from 1917 to the end of his life but also occupied herself indefatigably with arrangements for publishing his works. The 'anonymous donations' enabled him to go on writing his masterpiece, the novel "ULYSSES". 1918: Ulysses began to appear in serial form in The   Little   Review .  Joyce published «Ulysses» in 1922. T.S. Eliot declared that Ulysses was the most important expression which the Modern age has found.  1939: “Finnegans Wake” (his last novel, where he experimented the "extreme interior monologue") was published. o Joyce's voluntary exile from Ireland when he was 22 was due to his belief that life in Ireland was an obstacle to his development as an artist. o According to Joyce, the only way to serve any form of art is by breaking free from whatever burdens and suffocates you and obliges you to follow a definite and pre-established way of being, thinking and living. o As Joyce clearly explains through Stephen Dedalus' words in his novel «A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man», to express him-herself, an artist has to break free from three main obstacles: fatherland, church, family. Stephen Dedalus: "Look here, Cranly" - he said - "You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning."  Joyce’s language is brilliant and lucid, the details are chosen and organized so meticulously that their symbolic meanings intensify as the events and images