James Joyce and Thomas Eliot: Dublin, Impersonality, and The Waste Land, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce and Thomas Eliot: Dublin, Impersonality, and The Waste Land e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce • He was born in Dublin at the end of 19th century. He grew up in a Jesuit school, he was catholic but then changed his mind and left the Catholic church refusing his values. Then he escaped from Dublin to a vision from the outside of the city, for him Dublin was both negation and fluffiness, a dream and a nightmare. He was interested in the European culture, and he thinks of himself as a European rather than an Irishman. Yeats was focused on traditions while Joyce used to look forward. HE spent some time in Paris than came back to Dublin, then he started publishing stories as The Sisters, Evening Telegraph and The Dubliners. During his life he felt in love with MS Barnacle and they had their first date on the 16th of June which became the bloom’s day of Ulysses. Then he came to Italy he met Italo Svevo and was influenced by him and his ideas. Then he moved to Zurich with his family and published Ulysses, his masterpiece. Joyce never saw the conclusion of World War II, coz he died young in 1941. We studied the features of Joyce’s works: first of the setting of most of his works was Ireland, especially Dublin. His rebellion against the Catholic Church. He was focused on the inner aspects of his characters, the psychological side and the states of mind, and the time in his works is perceived as subjective. He uses the free direct speech and we saw Minimal dialogue but various interior monologue to express feelings and emotions. There’s no didactic or moral aim because of the impersonality of the author. • DUBLIN: Dubliners is made up 15 short stories and we can divide it in 4 sections: childhood, adolescence, mature life and public life. (Evelin belongs to the Adolescence) Dubliners are described as afflicted people. All the stories taken from the Dubliners are set in Dublin and in his opinion the city seemed the center of paralysis’, Physical, mental but also Moral linked to religion, politics and culture. Alternative to paralysis: escape which always leads to failure. An epiphany comes from a meaningless object or detail. • One of the most important features of Joyce is the use of epiphany which is ‘the sudden manifestation’ of an interior reality, a sudden revelation. An epiphany is what Virginia Wool called “Moment of being” and what Marcel Proust called “Madeleine”. His aim was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through epiphany. Understanding the epiphany in each story is the key to the story itself. EVELINE This extract is taken from The Dubliners by James Joyce and it talks about Eveline, a 19-year-old Irish girl who lives at the beginning of the nineteenth century. She belongs to the poorer social classes and lives with her violent father. In this scene she is sitting at the window and while looking out of it, she starts thinking about her sweet childhood memories when her mother was still alive and she and her siblings played carefree in the open air, down the street and in the fields which have been destroyed to build red brick houses on them. Everything has changed over time: one of his brothers died and the other one started to work far from home, so nobody protects her anymore. Then her thoughts go to her humble and frustrating job that she hates and makes her want to run away from. The way out seems to be her future husband Frank, her life saver, who will take her away from Dublin to restart a new life overseas. Frank is a friendly and kind sailor who Eveline's father can't stand. He offers her to move to Buenos Aires and twist their lives, but when it's finally time to leave Eveline will stay motionless on the quay letting her lover go without her. This feeling of immobility is common in people living in the early nineteenth century, especially in Dublin. They would like to run away from their unsatisfying lives but somehow, they are physically and mentally paralyzed there and they cannot change their situations. This feeling reflects Joyce's thoughts, he both loves and hates Dublin as well as his characters. The stillness and monotony of Eveline's life is reflected in the text: in the first half she is motionless and it's all about her thoughts and feelings, until she suddenly stands up in a moment that Joyce calls epiphany because she understands that Frank can save her life , but actually at the end she won't be strong enough to run away with him and will stay in Dublin being passive like a helpless animal. Symbolic words 1) dust = decay, paralysis 2) sea = action, escape Themes: 1. struggle between one’s happiness and one’s responsibility; 2. dream vs reality; 3. action and inactivity; 4. paralysis and the failure to find a way out of it. Gabriel’s epiphany It’s an extract take from “The Dead” by J. Joyce. Gabriel (the protagonist of the story) and his wife Gretta have come back from the Christmas Party to their hotel, in Dublin. Gabriel tries to seduce his wife but she looks absent-minded. He's surprised and happy when she kisses him. Gabriel asks her what she's thinking about. At first, she doesn't answer; then she bursts into tears and tells her husband that she's thinking about the song she heard at the party and she's crying for a person she used to know a long ago. That person was Michael Furey, her past lover; he used to sing that song. Now she can clearly see him; particularly she remembers his big dark eyes. Not only does Gretta's epiphany evoke her half-forgotten memories, but it also brings about a new awareness of her relationship with Gabriel. Gabriel gets angry and jealous. He feels ashamed and takes pity upon himself. He turns back because he doesn't want Gretta to understand his feelings. All that reveals that he's not self-confident. Gretta tells Gabriel that Michael died after waiting for her outside of her grandmother's house in the cold the night before she left for Dublin. Gabriel, who is shocked by what he has just learned from his wife, holds her hand for a moment and then walks towards the window. Epiphany the song The Lass of Aughrim, reminds Gretta of a young man, Michael Furey, who died for her when he was seventeen years old. Gabriel understands he is more dead than Michael Furey in Gretta’s mind. He realizes he didn’t count much in his wife’s life. He used the imagery a series of symbolic antithesis: living / dead, light / darkness, warmth / cold, present / past SYMBOLS the snow = a change in Gabriel, a desire to change. the falling snow = heaven or death reached by people at the end of their life. Snow covers everything dead and living indifferently. Gabriel’s journey to the west = better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade with age. The protagonists: Gabriel Conroy, an embodiment of Joyce himself, and Gretta, his wife. Gabriel’s marriage is clearly suffering from paralysis. Then we noticed dull colours, darkness: reflect the Dubliners. THOMAS ELIOT He was born at the ed of the 19th century in the USA, but He studied in Harvard, Paris at the Sorbonne. His works are divided in 2 sections: before and after his conversion to Anglicanism. The first period is marked by a pessimistic view of the world without any hope, values or ideas, examples are: Prufrock and Other Observations, The Hollow Man and his masterpiece that is The Waste Land. After the conversion his works were completely different coz, he underlined the concepts of joy purification and hope, he wrote: Ash Wednesday, Murder in the cathedral x example. So, in the first part of his life he used to deal with specific issues such as: the loss of faith, the collapse of moral values, the pessimism. He gained the Nobel Prize x Literature in 1948. He shared with J Joyce the concept of impersonality of the author, who has only a medium not a personality to express. The Waste Land It is an autobiography written in a moment of crisis in the poet’s life. The poem deals with the physical and emotional devastation of the post-war landscape. (WWI) It’s made up of five sections; it reflects the fragmented 20th-century mood and sensibility. The novel is about Tiresias, the Theban prophet, who experienced blindness and the life of both sexes; he moves through London and post-war Central Europe. Themes are: the breakdown of a social and cultural balance destroyed by World War I. Contrast between the past fertility and the present sterility. A new concept of history which consists in the repetition of the same events: the present and past exist simultaneously in the Waste Land. - Mixture of different poetic styles reproducing the chaos of modern civilisation. - Use of the objective correlative: it is the translation of an emotion, thought or abstract concept into something concrete. - Subjective experiences made universal. The burial of the dead It’s an extract taken from The Waste Land by Thomas Eliot. The setting is the city of London, peopled by the ghosts of the dead. Contrast between past and present: the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage and the clashes of World War I. The burial of the dead is a metaphor for the condition of contemporary man, whose life is meaningless, empty, alienating, and as a result quite similar to death. Traditional myths and symbols. The lines don't actually have a regular scheme, and the meter isn't traditional, there aren't classical divisions in stanzas, he uses the free verses technique. Even if the poem lacks traditional features, it contains some alliterations, which give it a kind of musicality. Repetitions of sounds and words. Since Eliot was influenced by Dante', he's trying to make the city (which is caught during its rush hour) look like Dante's Inferno. In this passage spring is regarded as a cruel season, since it breaks the illusion of safety and protection created by winter. The first line reminds us of Chaucer because Eliot starts by saying that April is the cruellest month while Chaucer compared it to a sweet shower at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales, so something positive while Eliot describes it as the cruellest month. April is usually connected to the Rebirth of nature, but Eliot turns upside. April becomes the cruellest month, instead winter keep human being warm. The speaker walks through London. They have lost the ability to communicate to each other – INCOMMUNICABILITY- The se. (The speaker sees a man he named Stetson. The two men fought together in the First d Punic War between Rome and Carthage. The speaker then asks Stetson about the pade Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, accusing Stetson of the fade of a corpse planted in his garden. The section ends with a famous line from the preface to the poet's from LE fleur du mal by Baudelaire accusing the reader of sharing the poet’s destiny. People who are part of the crowd in the City are staring their feet, so it is possible to understand how frustrated they feel. Stetson is one of the people Eliot meets in the crowd, and he's likely to be identified with Ezra Pound (who used to wear the Stetson hat). The contemporary man feels useless, empty and overwhelmed by an alienating reality, which can be compared to death. The Dog the author mentions is probably three-headed Cerberus, which traditionally guards the entrance of Hell. Eliot calls the reader " mon frère!" (quoting Baudelaire) as they both share the same situation so the same feeling of alienating can be compared to death. The title is meaningful, it’s symbolic, represents a desolated and dry city. He was influenced by St. James Frazer, Miss Jessy Weston. They both wrote about ancient myths, especially Ms Weston who made links between myths and Christianity. In 1 of her legends she focused on the story of the Fisher King about death, rebirth and fertility. This story is about an infertile king and his land that is infertile and dry as well. The only thing that he can do is fishing, a lot of knights come to him trying to heal him, but the only one who can do it is Percival. So, Eliot took inspiration from this land that is dry land, a Waste Land. In this poem Eliot asks himself if we’re truly alive or we’re in a limbo between life and death, he underlines the death of the soul. Eliot talks about a crowd made up of neutrals people, dead inside who are compared to the neutrals in the Dante’s hell. They are neutrals coz they never took risks and decisions so actually they never lived. They are the waste of the universe, the aimlessness, they were unable to achieve their desires. In this text we can notice an allusion to the Bible pointing to Christ’s death at the 9 hours, this represents the death of the soul of the business men who start to work at the 9th hour. So, the stroke of this hour represents a death knell of humanity. The reference to the First Punic War metaphorically stands for the universal issue due to the decay of the contemporary society (which came from the first World War). The P Wars and the 1WW were both fought x economic reasons. So, he puts a 1920 business man at Mayli he universalizes the futility of war and it’s financially aim. Ian McEwan He was born in England in the 1948, he’s still alive, one of the few authors we study who are still leaving. We studied one of his masterpieces that is called “Black Dogs” but he has published a lot of works, tales, collection of short stories such as The Child in Time where he shows his view of Thatcher’s England, a country marked by where poverty and squalor. Then he published “The daydreamer”, “Nutshell”, “Atonement”… BLACK DOGS Black Dogs is 1992 historical novel by Ian McEwan. The title is evocative coz Churchill’s depressions were called Black Dogs. But for McEwan had a broader meaning, evil, darkness, the story is fictional, but it’s presented a memoirs of two British communists who live through the postwar years (World War II) and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The novel has themes of love, faith, and political ideology. The novel is narrated by Jeremy who told us the story of his, the main characters’ son-in-law. Jeremy is an orphan, in the first part of his life he feels alone, until he marries a woman called Jenny and he ties up with her parents, Bernard and June. Through their memories he’s able to reconstruct the story of their love and marriage and also of their faith in communism and their later disillusionment and the incident which gives the novel its title. They separated because of ideological differences: Bernard was a sceptic, rational and atheist man, while June was very religious. Jeremy stands/embodies for reason and June for faith, religion. During their honeymoon they came to Italy and started, they volunteer with the Red Cross and see the horrible consequences of the World War II. Everyone they met is destroyed by the death of a family member. So, they understood their inability to change the world. One day while hiking in the mountains in France, June has a terrifying encounter with two black dogs. The event has a devastating effect on her. According to her these dogs represent all the evil in the world, including the horrors of war. (METAPHOR). In that moment she discovers a sense of the divine inside her that enabled her to resist dogs. At the end of the story, the narrator, Jeremy understands that keeping faith and reason apart can lead not only to the end of a relationship, but to desperation. Because in life we must not aim for excesses but find a middle way. Metaphor by which he can turn a fictional family memoir into a meditation or Europe’s past and future. (Linked to 1986) Black dog- remind of the dogs of the Gestapo, also the dogs appear in animal farm by Orwell + meditation about existence of evil - Clash of science and mysticism, rationality and magic, the existence of evil, the moral limit of political reform and religious believes, the excessive violence and some of the major events of the 20th century in Europe. - Those are the dogs of the Gestapo brought to France to intimidate its inhabitants, but after the D day (invasion of Normandy) the German came back to Germany and the dogs were left on their own and ran wild. After attaching June these dogs disappeared but at the end of the book the reader sees them again with Jeremy’s visionary warning that the Black dogs will return to Europe. What happened could happen again. - 1 of the topics is violence coz all the book is full of violence (in Jeremy’s youth, also the episode connected with Jeremy and Bernard visit to Berlin is full of violence (title: a racy attack). Violence is connected with rejection of civilization. A racy attack This is an extract taken from Black Dogs by Ian McEwan, it’s about Jeremy and his father in law, Bernard who travel to Berlin, here they see a Turkish demonstrator being attacked by a group of Neo-Nazis skinhead. He holds a red flag, and he is abused physically and verbally him Bernard decides to act, to defend him. He stands between the Turkish man and the neo Nazis and spread his arm. Jeremy is worried about Bernard’s health and doesn’t want him to get involved in the fight. The demonstrator manages to escape and a group of Nazis gather around Bernard. They hit him until a woman, a young woman, comes out of the crowd to insult them. Insult their virility calling them naughty boys as they were children. Indeed, they pretended to be bored and walk away. This Turkish man symbolizes the minorities that become object of contempt even in democracy, it’s a fake democracy. Mc Ewan is politically involved. this text wants to underline the violent and hypocritical atmosphere. Indeed, McEwan talks about respectable Germans who don’t even take action when Bernard is kicked by the Nazis sympathizers but they applauded when the woman rescued him. They represent Hypocrisy and cowardly. Bernard tries to defend the Turkish man and becomes himself a victim. The Nazis respect nothing and embody evil, the present force of violence The fall of the wall should stand for the end of racial hatred. Actually, this fall only signed the end of one period of oppression (under the Cold War) to be replaced by another (under democracy).