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 on the 2nd of February 1882 in a very large family. He attended a college in Dublin and then, after the graduation, moved to Paris because he wanted to become a doctor but he soon changed his mind indeed Joyce started concentrating on writing poems and prose sketches and developed his distinctive aesthetic theories. In 1903, he met his future wife, Nora, and they moved to the Continent. Then in 1905, the couple moved away to Trieste where Joyce worked as an English teacher. In 1914, James published the “Dubliners” a highly innovative collection of short stories. When the World War I began Joyce and his family fled to Switzerland. This period was intense for the author indeed he wrote much of his masterpiece “Ulysses”. Literature have always been one of Joyce’s biggest passion and during this period he is interested in symbolism and realism. During the same year, Joyce started working on his novel “Finnegans Wake”, in which he broke down English grammar and syntax and invented its own polylinguistic vocabulary a mixture of existing words, inventive words and non-existent words. James Joyce died in Zurich in 1941. NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE James Joyce with his work contributed to the born of the Modernism, a literary movement interested in the weakness and psychology of the human. This narrative technique give a big space to the voices and the thoughts of each protagonist neglecting the omniscient narrator creating every times different points of view. In his works Joyce uses a lot of monologues in the shape of direct speech or thoughts. The linguistic register changes depending on the age, the social class and to the role of the protagonist that speaks. Joyce sees the space as a continuous line; for him the consequences of the past are in the present and the present determines the future. STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS The stream of consciousness is the narrative technique used by James Joyce in his novels and it consists in the description of a character’s thoughts as they appear in his mind before they are organized into logic forms by his conscience, the rational and conscious part of the mind. The most important technique used by the author is called the “interior monologue” and can be direct and indirect. The direct interior monologue is when there is the direct presentation of a character’s stream of consciousness without the guiding presence of an author or narrator. The indirect interior monologue is the opposite, which means, an indirect presentation of the character’s thoughts filtered through the voice of an anonymous third person narrator. Stream of consciousness’ characteristics are free syntax, absence of punctuation, syntactic connectives and introduction for people or events, presence of grammatical mistakes. EPIPHANY The “epiphany” in Joyce’s works is something strictly connected to the five senses. It is the moment in a story or in a novel when petty details, thoughts, gestures, objects, feelings and so on come together to produce a new sudden awareness, our senses make us think about something and make us understand something deeper. DUBLINERS “Dubliners” is a collection of 15 short stories first published in 1914. In his work James Joyce describes the Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. In the collection there are two recurring themes: the paralysis and the escape. The paralysis is view by Joyce as a spiritual and moral paralysis due to the politics, the religion and the Irish culture of the time but it is often describes through a physical and psychological paralysis of the characters or also through the description of old and dusty objects and places. Because of this paralysis the characters don’t have any satisfactory relationship with the others and with the world. The other theme, the escape, is strictly connected to the previous one because the reaction to the realizing of this paralysis is the escape that always fail indeed no one succeed in getting rid of his world physically or psychologically. Every single tale is told from one of the character’s point of view with a little interference of the narrator. Joyce in this collection uses mainly the direct speech, even when describing the characters’ thoughts because in this way he allow the reader to deeply understand the characters. JOYCE AND THE PSYCHOANALYSIS James Joyce gain knowledge of the psychoanalysis the first time in Trieste and then more deeply in Zurich, considered the capital of the psychoanalysis. Joyce was interested by this new topic, by the 1922 he had read almost all of Freud works, indeed the “Ulysses” and “Finnegans wake” show Joyce’s vast knowledge of the psychoanalytic theories. These theories helped him in the expedition in the subconscious of his characters. Thanks to James Joyce the psychoanalytic theories moved to the warmth and prosperity of the art. ULYSSES “Ulysses” was first published in an American journal in 1918 and it was declared obscene but is was finally published in Paris in 1922 in its entirety. It is considered one of the most important works of Modernist literature. Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary