Dubliners by James Joyce, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Dubliners by James Joyce e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! DUBLINERS Joyce and Woolf are two modernist writers, focused on experimentation → they try to figure out how to represent the stream of consciousness, with the technique of the interior monologue, which gives the author the ability to demonstrate the difference between subjective and chronological time → Virginia Woolf respected punctuation, syntax and the grammatical order, whereas Joyce, by writing Ulysses (1922), gets to the limit of writing rules, because he eliminates the syntax and punctuation, he only uses the sounds of words and mixes them. Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories, written around 1904-1907, published in 1914, in which he analyses the Irish middle- and lower-middle-class life → all these stories are characterised by two elements: the epiphany (a sudden revelation) and the paralysis ⇒ the epiphany is a short event that immediately makes understand something clearly, it helps the characters change their life but the problem is that Dubliners are paralysed socially, religiously and culturally (in that period, the Easter Rising affected people of Ireland, so he wanted to awaken them) In The Sisters, the opening story, the protagonist is a priest, which means that Ireland was also influenced by the institution of the church. The moment when the priest has his realisation is the breaking of the chalice, meaning that the institution of the church was falling into pieces. Also, the priest was physically half paralysed and after the incident, he becomes detached from the society and the church and stays alone. Eveline is a 19-years-old girl, who was already considered as a mature woman → she has the opportunity to change her life; she lives with her alcoholic father, while her mother died. In this story, we can find the split of what goes on inside her mind and the reality (she thinks about herself and the future) → finally, she decides to stay instead of leaving, this because she had a paralysis = she was not ready to escape (what her mother said to her in her deathbed) In The Dead, Gretta’s husband sees her expression, which for Gabriel is a revelation = he understands that a young lover called Michael was still present in her mind, even more than himself. Gabriel asks himself if it was him, instead of Michael, who had died, due to the fact that he never shower true love to Gretta Ulysses (1922) We can find in this novel an important evolution in style and language from Dubliners → experimentation: there’s no difference between the characters’ reality and thoughts, we find the difference between chronological and subjective, sentences are not separated by punctuation. Ulysses is set in Dublin; even though Joyce left Ireland, he continued writing about it → in Ireland, Joyce would have been influenced by oppression, so he had to leave in order to live his life and have freedom. It’s considered to be Joyce’s masterpiece, published in 1922, even though it was originally censored in England due to its explicit content. Joyce creates a series of parallels between Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus was the hero of Homer’s epic poem. There are similarities between the experiences of characters Odysseus and Joyce’s main characters. It’s set in Dublin, even though the author had already left, because he still cared about the situation in his homeland. Finnegan’s Wake (1939) In this novel, the stream of consciousness is taken to the maximum level → there are only sounds and words are followed by assonances without grammar rules → Joyce wanted properly to express the words of the characters' mind, so we jump from reality to shift to their immediate thoughts. STRUCTURE, STYLE AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE: The structure of Dubliners can be seen to parallel the development of a human being, in his various stages of human life from childhood to adulthood: the first stories focus on (and/or are narrated by) children; the next few stories discuss young love and maturing experiences; the penultimate stories look at maturity and failed family life, adult social life, including politics, religion, and sexual relationships. It’s also important to notice how this collection begins and ends with a death: in fact, in the first short story, “The Sisters”, we have the physical death of Father Flynn, the priest (religion) and the last story “The Dead”, deals with the moral death of Gabriel Conroy, an intellectual (culture). No two stories have the same stylistic profile, there are stylistic variations. We also find the chiasmus = repetition of images that creates melodic effects. Joyce describes his characters’ lives and environs as realistically as possible. All of the stories captur how Dubliners spoke at the turn of the twentieth century, their socioeconomic situation and education. Joyce portrayed the world as it really was, he wanted to represent the “real” world without romanticising or idealising it. In the first 3 stories there is a first person narrator, who is nameless and not identified. In the other 12 stories we can find a third person narrator, who reflects the language and the sensitivity of the character who is being described. In fact Joyce’s third person narrator adopts the style of his character’s consciousness and the text mirrors the character’s way of thinking or speaking. All the stories are characterised by the technique of the interior monologue, a technique used to represent the unspoken activity of the mind and to give us an insight into the characters’ thoughts and motivations and in which the mind moves from one thinking to another. Joyce’s style is very realistic. Dubliners doesn’t represent the peak of Joyce’s experimentation, but it shows some of his more “modernist” techniques, such as the interior monologue, that anticipates the stream of consciousness. Time is mainly