Scarica T.S. Eliot and James Joyce: Transatlantic Journey in Modern Literature e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot (t.s. Eliot) was born in 1888 in Missouri, into an English family. In 1906 he went to Harvard where he graduated, then he moved to the Sorbonne university to study Bergson's philosophy. In France he began to read French symbolist works. Then he moved to Germany where he continued to study literature and philosophy. But at the end of World war 1 all ended and he was forced to leave Germany, to stay in England, in Oxford to study philosophy. All of these European travel will influence his later works. After the teaching experience, he went to work at the Lloyd Banks. Thanks to Ezra pound, Eliot in this period had the opportunity to publish his first major poem "the love song of J. Alfred prufrock". During these years Eliot had to deal with a lot of strains: economic problems, bad relationship with his wife, his nervousness and a general dissatisfaction of modern life, like all the author in that period. All of these things will bring him to a mental breakdown, doctors hospitalized him in a clinic. During this period he finished the waste land. After the period in hospital he moved to Paris to submit the work to Ezra, that made a lot of cuts. The waste land made Eliot the major modernist poet in England. While he continued writing he Found a way out of nihilism in Christianity, especially in the Anglican church. In fact during these years he wrote some work like "Ash Wednesday" and " the journey of magi". After WW2 he developed a new kind of drama, combining the presentation of a philosophical theme with contemporary subjects using a colloquial language. Then he started writing sophisticated social comedies. In 1948 he won the Nobel prize. He will die in London in 1965. His masterpiece: the waste land This work is the obvious Detachment to the Victorian novel. Its influence on future authors is immense. The poem is divided in 5 sections: ● The burial of the dead ● A game of chess ● The Fire sermon ● Death by water ● What the thunder said This poem is considered by many one of the most important works in the entire 20th century. It expresses the disillusion with the modern world and the desperate need for a new tradition and it also represents the culmination of Eliot's nihilism. Around him the poet only saw ruin and desolation and is occupied by the aspects of the decay of Western civilization after ww1. Everything written there doesn't have any logical order. This fragmentation is a reflection of the fragmentation of reality that surrounds Eliot in that time, in which everyone has to find his personal order or interpretation (so we have spiritual dryness and sterility of modern life). To better highlight this sterility, Eliot compares ancient myths with modern decadence. The lack of a traditional structure is a standard feature of modernist novel: time shifts and the use of the stream of consciousness are an example of it. Eliot was also a huge fan of Dante Alighieri, in fact there are some elements in his masterpiece that remembers us Dante's inferno. James Joyce James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 into a Catholic decadent family; the father was a Convinced supporter of the home rule party, but then this party broke up, this will be in future a symbol for Joyce of the Irish decadence. At first he went to a Catholic school, then to the university college of Dublin, where he graduated. Given the Irish context was an obstacle for his artistic development, he moved to Paris, then to Pola, in Croatia and then in Trieste, an important city for his personal Development, in fact there he finished "Dubliners", a collection of short stories. When the ww1 broke up he moved to Switzerland, a neutral country; here he started working on his masterpiece "Ulysses", here his eyesight problems got worse. After the world war he moved to Paris where Ulysses was published, after that he wrote his last novel " Finnegans Wake", but when France was occupied by the Nazis, he returned to Zurich where he died in 1941. The relationship between Joyce and Ireland is very particular, in fact in a first lecture we could see that he rejects everything about that nation, but in an inner level, we can see that all Joyce's works are settled in Ireland, in particular in Dublin, that know very well. Everything in his works refers to that city, also in the details. As always the life of the author and his artistic style are very linked, in fact, the auto exile he did from his motherland gave him a 360 perception of the Irish reality, becoming objective in judging it. In addition to it we have a vision in his works that goes from the particular to the universal, we call it the deductive style. We have also a strong comparison with classical poem (the Odyssey of Homer) Dubliners Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories in which in each is examined in a psychological way the failure of the self realization of a Dubliner. The first 14 one were written and published in 1905, that at first were rejected by the editors, because of the "immorality" out the pitiless description of Irish life and the mention of real places. The last called "the dead" is the longest one and was finished in 1907, but the entire collection was published in 1914. All the work is about a concept: the paralysis of will, that is a realisation of ordinary men and women of their limitations imposed by the society in which they live in. This sense of stagnation runs through all the stories and is presented in 4 stage: ● Childhood ● Youth ● Maturity ● Public life The style of Dubliners is very complex, at a first lecture we could notice that is a realistic work, by all the elements mentioned in the stories (streets, squares, pubs etc), but in a more deeply lecture we can notice that is a symbolic, even if it's very subtle, that gives us a new vision of reality: the epiphany, and it's when people see an object full of meaning and become aware of their miserable condition.
