James Joyce, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce James Joyce is said to be «the greatest», «the most influential», «the most intense», «the most human», «the most enigmatic», «the most complicated», «the funniest» writer of the 20th century. He was born in Dublin in 1882 into a large Roman Catholic family. He received an excellent education at two of the most prestigious Jesuit colleges in Dublin and later at University. He studied French, Italian and German languages and literatures and English literature, and graduated in modern languages in 1902. Some of the writers he admired the most during his University years where Dante, considered his «spiritual food»; D’Annunzio, whose lyrical prose he found remarkable; Ibsen, about whom he published an article in a literary magazine. The money he received for it enabled him to visit London, and this trip, together with his interest in European literatures, led him to begin to think of himself as a European rather than an Irishman. On completing his studies, having grown intolerant of the Catholic religion and the provincial life of Dublin, he moved to Paris but soon had to return to Dublin to assist his dying mother. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, who remained his life-long companion. They went to Paris, Zurich and eventually to Pula and Trieste where he earned his living teaching English at the Berlitz School. While in Italy he became friendly with The Italian writer Italo Svevo, who was greatly influenced by Joyce (La Coscienza di Zeno). By now Joyce had been dedicating himself to writing for some time and in 1905 he completed his short stories collection, Dubliners, although this was not published until 1914. At the outbreak of the First World War, Joyce went with his family to Zurich where he began to write Ulysses. It was published in France in 1922 having met with censorship problems in England. In 1923 he started his second major work, Finnegans Wake (published in 1939) and though suffering a serious eye disease which left him almost blind he continued writing. With the outset of the Second World war and the fall of France, Joyce returned to Zurich where he died in 1941. He is probably one of the most radical innovators of the modern novel. He moved from the symbolic and realistic style for his first prose work, i.e. the collection of short stories Dubliners, to the revolutionary style (labelled modernist) of his later novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, which left a strong mark on much of the ensuing literature. Dublin Though Joyce went into voluntary exile at the age of 22, hi Paddy he said all his works in Ireland and mostly in the city of Dublin, which was the second largest town in the British Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. While London had been made famous in literature by Charles Dickens and other writers, Dublin had never been represented and probably Joyce considered it his mission to give his hometown a literary importance. He's a Fort was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and leaving ordinary situations (Dubliners and Ulysses), and he did it in such an accurate way that he himself stated that if Dublin were to be completely destroyed, people could rebuild it by using his books as a reference. He succeeded in catching the extraordinary moments of enlightenment of this ordinary Dubliners in his attempt to embrace the whole of man’s mental, emotional and biological reality and fuse it with the cultural heritage of modern civilization and with the reality of the natural world around him (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). The rebellion against the church Joyce, well-trained by the Jesuits, who formed his very meticulous mind, challenged Catholicism affirming that “ the church has made inroads everywhere, so that we are in fact becoming a bourgeois nation, with the church supplying our aristocracy […] And I do not see much hope for us intellectually”. His hostility toward the church was the revolt of the artist- heretic against the official doctrine or the struggle between an aesthete-heretic and a provincial and philistine church which had taken possession of Irish minds. But, at root, the conflict was even more painful; it was a conflict between a son and his parents (Dubliners) lived to a quest for his artistic potentialities (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). A poor eye-sight