James Joyce and Virginia Woolf: Irish Modernists and Literary Innovators, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce and Virginia Woolf: Irish Modernists and Literary Innovators e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, studied in Jesuit schools. His most important works are Dubliners, A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Joyce set all of his work in Ireland and Dublin to give literary importance to his hometown. James Joyce was nearly blind, so the sound of words was very important to him. Joyce's novels open in media res and the character is based on introspection. Impersonality is used by the artist to render life objectively. Joyce in his style emphasizes the exploration of the impressions of the characters, the freedom of speech and the inner monologue. In 1905 Joyce settled in Trieste, where he began teaching English and made friends with Italo Svevo. The years in Trieste were difficult, full of disappointments and financial problems. The first of his works that appeared in book form was a collection of 36 short poems, Chamber Music (1907) and Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories about Dublin and his life was completed in 1905 but only published on the eve of WWI. In 1915 Joyce moved to Zurich with her family, and a few years later moved to Paris, where the American bookseller Sylvia Beach undertook to publish Ulysses in 1922. This novel received both praise and harsh criticism. He died at the age of 59 in January 1941. He was buried in Zurich. Although Joyce went into voluntary exile at the age of 22, he set all of his works in Ireland and mainly in the city of Dublin. His effort was to provide a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. Joyce, influenced by the French Symbolists, believed in the impersonality of the artist. The artist's task was to objectively render life in order to give readers a faithful image of it. This necessarily led to the artist's isolation and detachment from society. In Joyce, therefore, technique and language developed from the realism and disciplined prose of the Dubliners, and through the use of free speech to the inner monologue. DUBLINERS Dubliners consists of 15 short stories; they all lack obvious action. The opening stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin. Joyce, being a Modernist novelist, was hostile to city life, finding that it degraded its citizens. In fact, his Dublin is a place where true feeling and compassion for others do not exist, where cruelty and selfishness lie just below the surface. The last story, The Dead, was a late addition and can be considered Joyce's first masterpiece. It summarises themes and motifs of the other 14 stories of the collection, but it functions more as an epilogue. Everyone in Dublin seems to be caught up in an endless web of despair. The description in each story is realistic and extremely concise, with the use of realism is mixed with symbolism, since external details generally have a deeper meaning. Religious symbolism can also be found, like the holy chalice which is mysteriously broken and is crucial to the real meaning of The Sisters. Even colour symbolism is widely employed in the collection. Joyce thought that the function of symbolism was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through the analysis of the particular. To this end he employed a peculiar technique called “epiphany". The interior monologue and patterned repetition of images, that is, chiasmus. In the first three short stories, which make up the childhood section, Joyce employs a firstperson narrator. For the other 12 stories a third-person narrator is employed: he often shares a particular character’s perspective. The narrator tends to disappear in the interior monologue, which is the form of free direct speech: the protagonist's pure thoughts are introduced without any reporting verbs. The language of Dubliners appears simple, objective and neutral. Chiasmus can create melodic effects, as in the final sentence of The Dead. EVELINE "Eveline" is a short story by writer James Joyce, (contained in the "People of Dublin" collection), and tells of a nineteen-year-old girl named Eveline Hill, who looks thoughtfully with curious eyes from her window trying to understand thanks to his observation what can happen outside that window. She sees them as a man, probably a musician playing a barrel organ and that her melody reminds her of a melody she had heard just before her mother died. At that point Evelin is assailed by her memories linked to her childhood; he reminds her of her father of her, a man a little fluctuating towards her, because sometimes he treated her badly, other times he was good to her. She also thinks of her mother and her brother Ernest, who is also missing. She thinks about her job as a saleswoman in a small warehouse and she feels disappointed and dissatisfied, also for the behavior that her employer has towards her, teasing her and treating her badly in front of others and so she decides to leave, in the end she doesn't he had nothing to lose. Eveline decides to leave for Buenos Aires with Frank, her boyfriend who was a sailor. Before her departure, the girl wrote two letters to two loved ones: one for her brother Harry and the other for her father. VIRGINIA WOOLF Born Virginia Stephen in London in 1882, Virginia Woolf was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, she grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere and became a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which included the avant-garde of early 20°-century London. For these writers, artists and thinkers, the common denominators were a contempt for traditional morality and Victorian respectability, a rejection of artistic convention and a disdain for bourgeois sexual codes. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf ang in 1915 she published The Voyage Out, her first novel. In 1925 the novel Mrs Dalloway appeared, in which Virginia successfully experimented with new narrative techniques. It was followed by To the Lighthous and Orlando. Virginia was also a very talented literary critic and a brilliant essayist, as her volume of literary essays, The Common Reader (1925). In 1929 she delivered two lectures at Cambridge University, which later became A Room of Ones Own, a work of great impact on the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Virginia saw the human personality asa continuous shift of impressions and emotions. In her novels the omniscient narrator disappeared, and the point of view shifted inside the different characters’ minds through flashbacks. MRS DALLOWAY (VIRGINIA WOOLF) The story of Mrs. Dalloway develops in a single day in London. It’s a June morning and Clarissa Dalloway leaves home to buy flowers for the party she has organized for the evening. During the day Clarissa has many changes of moods and memories. Her day is contrasted with the figure of Septimus Smith, a disturbed. At the end of the day he commits suicide by jumping out of the window of his room, it was a veteran. News of his death intrudes upon Clarissa’s party. Learning about this tragic event, Clarissa reflect on how necessary it is for her that Septimus dies because as he embrace death, she can embrace life. Time is often dilated and a single moment can last for a very long time, this is possible through the technique of the indirect interior monologue, used by Virginia to represent the gap between chronological and interior time. One of Virginia Woolf’s aim in writing Mrs. Dalloway is reduce the time unit. Each character is introduced through his/her own thoughts in order to convey the subjectivity of experience. - Clarissa Dalloway: she is married to Mr. Dalloway, a conservative member of the Parliament. She is described in her many changing moods, but we also see her through the eyes of other characters, such as Peter Walsh (the man she once loved but refused to marry). Clarissa is characterized by opposing feelings: