James Joyce (1882-1941), Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce (1882-1941) e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Pag. 1 a 5 James Joyce Early life in Dublin He was born in Dublin in 1882 into a middle-class Catholic family, whose financial resources gradually diminished during his childhood. His father had been a supporter of Charles Parnell, the leader of the movement for Home Rule for Ireland that had wanted independence from England. After Parnell’s death, Joyce’s father retired from political life and for Joyce he became representative of the failures of his own country. Joyce attended two Jesuit schools, then he moved to Dublin to study modern languages where he graduated. Joyce lived outside Ireland and returned only twice, the second time he married and he left with his wife Nora Barnacle. A life of self-imposed exile He found life in Ireland an obstacle to his own artistic development, therefore in 1902 he committed himself to a life of self-imposed exile. He went first to Paris, then to Pola and finally to Trieste (where he met Svevo). Here he finished ‘Dubliners’ and ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. At the outbreak of WWI, he left for Zurich where he started working on his masterpiece, ‘ Ulysses’. In 1917 he underwent the first of many eye-operations against becoming blind. He came back then to Paris where he was considered one of the prophets of Modernism and where Ulysses was finally published in 1922. Later, Joyce wrote his last novel in 1939, ‘Finnegans Wake’. In 1940, when France was occupied by the Germans, he returned to Zurich where he died in 1941. Joyce and Ireland Their relationship is complex. All of Joyce’s works are centred on Ireland and on the Dublin he knew. Early 20th century Dublin (with people, streets, houses and language) occupies every page written by Joyce, who reproduces them with great care with precise details. Dublin was for him “the navel of the world”. The Journey of Joyce’s narrative His self-imposed exile was necessary to give him the objectivity he needed to write about Ireland with the necessary emotional and intellectual detachment. In parallel with this movement in his life, Joyce’s novels show a similar shift from the particular to the universal, from small to large. Also, the movement was from the lyrical style (A Portrait) to the epic style (Ulysses). Dublin like a universal meaning. Joyce thought that Dublin was the centre of a paralysis that could spread all over Europe because of three reasons: 1. There was a strong influence of Catholicism on Irish people. It makes them linked to tradition and not to innovations. 2. The state of submission of Ireland to Great Britain. 3. It affected the intellectuals of the country. They usually are the engine of a nation but instead of looking for something new they look back to the past, in particular to Celtic traditions. Joyce’s aim was to escape from Ireland to be able to give an objective description of the country (it was only possible living abroad). He wanted to “shake up” the Irish people showing them the situation. DUBLINERS, Joyce - 1914 Pag. 2 a 5 Circumstances of publication It is a collection of 15 short stories where the failure of self-realization of inhabitants of Dublin is examined in biographical and psychological detail. Publishers turned down the first 14 stories, they thought it “immoral” for its pitiless portrait of Irish city life and also objected to the mention of real places and people in it. The last and the longest story is called The Dead. ‘Dubliners’ is an experiment, not an ‘interior monologue’ yet. A portrait of Dublin life He said he chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to him the centre of paralysis (Dublin covered by snow that buries and freezes). Snow is connected to dust. This “paralysis” is the paralysis of will, courage and self-knowledge that leads people to accept the limitations imposed by the social context they live in. The sense of paralysis runs through all fifteen stories and is presented in four stages: childhood, youth, maturity and public life. Realism and symbolism in Dubliners The style is complex. It seems to be realistic to the degree of perfectly recreating characters, places, streets, pubs and idioms of contemporary Dublin. But Joyce makes use of a subtle symbolic effect that becomes the key to a new view of reality. Joyce himself coined the definition epiphany ( manifestation, as in the showing of the Christ child to the Magi) to indicate that moment when a simple object or fact, suddenly explodes with meaning and makes a person realise his condition. Epiphany is a sudden, unpredictable awareness of your condition looking at an object. Each character has an epiphany where they understand their condition of paralysis and stagnation. If they are conscious, they cannot find the will and the courage to change it. Thanks to an event, they become aware of the situation of paralysis they are living. But they do not have the courage to change.  Eveline, Dubliners (1914) The second part of Dubliners belongs to the short stories dealing with Youth. Eveline is a 19 years old girl. In Dublin’s life, Youth is not synonymous with vitality and enthusiasm, actually the opposite. The beginning is typical: the day is dying and the young woman is watching the world from her window. The sentence “she was tired” implies her tiredness with the life she is living. This story, like the others of the “youth group”, has at its centre a love story or a relation of a sort: Eveline has agreed to run away from an oppressive and violent father to follow Frank to Buenos Aires. But love goes wrong. In the end, she does not have the courage to go aboard the ship that would take her and Franco to Buenos Aires. She is paralysed. Characters represent the paralysis of human life in various steps. There is no introduction, it is an experiment. It doesn’t follow the traditional rule with introduction, development, climax and conclusion. It starts with “She”. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils there was the smell of dusty cretonne. Here dust is a symbol that represent the immobility. She was tired because the dust paralysed her from the inside. She saw some people passing. There is a reference to the past when it says that there used to be a field in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. But then a man from Belfast bought it and built bright brick houses there with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field. Ernest never played because he was too grown up. Her father used to hunt them in the field and made them come in with his stick. He was not so bad then and they seemed to be happy. Her mother was still alive. Now it comes back to the present where her mother is dead. Everything was changed and now she was ready to leave home like the others. Now she starts thinking about home: she looked around watching all its familiar objects which she had dusted (it represent the stillness) once a week for many years, wondering where all the dust came from. She is thinking that she will never see those objects again. During those years she had never found out the name of the priest (first object connected to the