Scarica Appunti di Inglese - James Joyce e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE -‐ He was born in Dublin in a Catholic family, he received an excellent Jesuit education. -‐ He travelled a lot, also in Italy, where he met Italo Svevo, who was greatly influenced by Joyce. -‐ Main works: Dubliners (1914), Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939) -‐ He is the most radical innovators of the modern novel. He moved from a symbolic and realistic style, in Dubliners, to a revolutionary style, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. 1. DUBLINERS § It is a collection of 15 stories in which he portrays the lives of different people living in Dublin. § He use an external narrator, but the stories are told from the pdv of the protagonist. § All the stories are connected to each other and they follow the 4 phases of human life: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life (political, artistic, religious). § All the stories are focus on a specific moment of the live of the protagonist: the moment of self awareness (consapevolezza) § Theme: Paralysis (condition which is characteristic to modern man, who live in a situation he doesn’t like but he is not able to change anything) and epiphany (is a moment in which the protagonist discover an emblematic truth or reality, is a sudden revelation in the everyday life) § EVELINE: this is the story of a young woman torn between duty and desire, the know and the unkonw. Eveline lives alone with her father in Dublin and she doesn’t like her situation, so she is thinking about leaving with her boyfriend, Frank, to start a new life in South America. Ø At the beginning she is watching out of the window instead at the end she is at the station. The rest of the story is about Eveline’s MIND Ø The description of the neighborhood and the places where the children play is a link to the previous story “Araby”. Ø E. starts to think about her past, she thinks of happy thing, when she played with her 2 brothers, when her father was not so bad and her mother was alive (very different situation!). Now nobody can protect her, she is not happy. In a distant country it wouldn’t be like that, she would like to change the situation but the fear of going away starts to grow up. Ø Frank is the prototype of the sailor conquering women telling his adventures (reference to Ulysses). Eveline is fascinated by the fact Frank is different: he is somebody who is able to get over the paralysis and build a new life for himself. Ø She tries to remember the rare positive moments in her life with his father. She cannot decide what to do. She remembers her mother asking her to keep the house together. Ø At the station she is blocked, she cannot react, she is completely possessed by the fear of unknown which is stronger than the fear of his father. Ø Eveline is the most evident example of paralysis of the book because here we find a physical and psychological paralysis. § THE DEAD: this is the last story and the longest one. It was added later and it is a sort of reflections on the nature (???). the protagonist is Gabriel Conroy, who is at a party organized by his 2 old aunts, for the feast of the Epiphany. He is with his wife Gretta. Ø Here we finds references to all the other stories: 1. Gabriel can be seen like the protagonist of “A little Cloud” (an intellectual) 2. Mary Jane is a connection with “A mother” 3. Lyly is connected with the “Two Gallants”, where the girl is exploited like her. Ø EPHIPANY: Gabriel is waiting all the evening to make love with Gretta and when the moment comes, he discovers what excite him was the thought of Gretta to Micheal. Gabriel contemplates his life: he is worried about that in his marriage they never had romantic episode. 1. At the beginning Joyce portrays the society of the time, he talks about the different classes and the religious thoughts. 2. After the party Gabriel and Gretta go to their hotel, where Gretta starts crying because she has remembers a former love, Micheal Furey, who died for her. 3. At the end of the story Gabriel is falling asleep, his consciousness is not completely awake, he is between life and death. Ø The title can be interpreted in two ways: it is referred to the people at the party, who symbolize Irish people in general, because they are not able to react to life and so they are spiritually dead. The title is also referred to Micheal Furey, who is dead but he still have a great influence on the living. At the end the falling snow represent the death and a kind of universal cleansing -‐ He wrote a letter to Grant Richards to convince him to publish his work -‐ He said that his book is a chapter of the moral history of his country, Ireland -‐ Dublin is a sort of synthesis of Ireland, it is the centre of paralysis -‐ He has tried to present: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life -‐ He makes some changes after public request but not the points which rivet the book together because all the stories are interconnected. It is important for him to keep the stories connected because the message is important: he wants to start a reaction, to start the spiritual liberation from paralysis -‐ à it’s a NOVEL, not just a collection of stories • SUBJECT: Dublin ● SETTING: Ireland ● THEME: the moral paralysis of Ireland • PURPOSE: the spiritual liberation of people • FORM: a collection of stories riveted together • STRUCTURE: progress from childhood to adolescence, to maturity and public life • ATMOSPHERE: a special odour of corruption • STYLE: scrupulous meanness (scrupolosa meschinità): not brilliant but it is realistic, it reflex the language of characters. (something he share with Italo Svevo) • USE OF TIME: the ages of man, the time of the year (seasons, passing of time), the 10 years covered by the narration (1895-‐1905) • THEMES: macrostructures: PARALYSIS /ages / single story • MOTIFS: microstructures: they are references to themes (ex: the dead priest in Araby) • KEYWORDS: 1. PARALYSIS: one of the responsible is the CHURCH 2. GNOMON: means the relation between the part and the whole 3. SIMONY: selling of sacred things and corruption of the church 1. CHILDHOOD a. Two Sisters b. An Encounter c. Araby § They all 4 are set in spring, they all have first persona narrator, the all have unpleasant encounter, the protagonist have no parents (just aunts and uncles) § They have different ages: a very young child, a schoolboy and an almost teenager but they are all morally paralyzed and they try to escape from Dublin and all 3 failed. 2. ADOLESCENCE a. Eveline b. After the Race c. Two Gallants d. The Boarding House § We can divide in 2 sequence: single protagonist: Eveline (girl) and Jimmy (young man); 3 characters each and they mirror one another: Two Gallants (2 men praying 1 woman) and The B.H. (2 women praying 1 man) § The two girls are adolescents but the other have just adolescent mind in negative sense (they haven’t grown up from the moral point of view) § In the character of Eveline the paralysis before is just psychological but then it becomes also physical: she plans to escape with a man but when the moment comes, she cannot move because the fear of new life is bigger than the fear and the disgust of present life 3. MATURITY a. A little cloud : shows the failure of an Irish intellectual (this is what Joyce probably fear) 2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): Dedalus is the protagonist. 3. ULYSSES § Indeed the novel is quite long, all the action takes place on one single day, 16 June 1904 (the day Joyce met his wife), and it deal with the life of 3 characters: Stephen Dedalus (which is also the protagonist of another work of J), Leopold and Molly Bloom. § The title refers to the Odyssey of Homer and there are also other connections: each chapter in Ulysses correspond to one adventures of the Odyssey, Dedalus corresponds to Telemachus, Leopold to Ulysses and Molly to Penelope, in particular an unfaithful Penelope who had several lovers. Leopold is an Ulysses who doesn’t travel around the big sea, he travels through Dublin. He is an exile as Ulysses is, because he is an Irish Jew. § The story takes place in Dublin and it tells about some events in a newspaper office, in a pub and at a funeral. § The real novelty is technique used by Joyce: the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness. § It is a prose style characterized by the absence of punctuation and of any conventional use of dialogue. In this way the reader come in contact directly with thoughts, emotions and memories of the characters. § The novel has no real plot, every actions of everyday life, even the smallest one, became relevant. § Usually the novel has a plot with the beginning, the middle and the end, it cover the entire life of the character or the relevant years, and the time is compressed. Here, instead, the proceed id the opposite: there is no plot, the time is dilated, it becomes longer of the real time of events. The use of time is the greatest difference. (Time was one of the main topics in philosophical discussion at the time: what time was, organized, the unity of time) § Steven is looking for a father figure and apparently he find it in Leopold Bloom. Molly’s soliloquy -‐ It is a very small passage in the final part of the book (18th episode), but it is very famous because it is one of the best example of stream of consciousness technique: Molly thoughts are directly presented, not filter at all. -‐ This passage is written in 8 huge paragraphs with no punctuation. -‐ Ulysses, unlike the Odyssey, ends with the voice of a woman, maybe to underline the role of women in the society of the time. Indeed Joyce tells about the desires and the thoughts typical of a more liberated and emancipated female figure. -‐ Dedalus represents the typical intellectual, instead Molly represents the importance of physical experiences for human beings. Text 1 -‐ At the beginning the monologue is quite organized (He tries to mark the pauses at least, there is no punctuation but it is regular from del syntactical point of view and the grammatical is quite correct), then, when she is quite sleeping, the thoughts reflect the situation of mind’s confusion. -‐ Summary: Molly is in bed and she is thinking and she is going to fall asleep. She starts telling about an unusual request from Leopold, that is to take him breakfast in bed. This fact remembers her when her husband was living in a hotel and he fakes to be sick to received the breakfast in bed by an old woman: Mrs Riordan. He thought the old lady had some affection for him but, when she died, she let them absolutely nothing. She left everything to the church to have messes celebration for the salvation for the soul. Molly is not politically correct but she is very spontaneous. She ends this part saying that Mrs Riordan was pious because she was so ugly that no men would ever be interested in her. Text 2 -‐ She reflects on flowers and nature and here we can see how Molly is a woman of physical perception: flowers and nature, colors and smells are very important to her. Nature corresponds to the presence of God in her life, so she despites atheism. The beauty of the nature is, for her, proof of God existence. -‐ Mountains, flowers, roses, the sea. She lived in the Mediterranean sea. -‐ There is not only the sublime nature of mountains and the sea, but also the beauty of the countryside: cultivated fields, lakes, flowers, cattle. Flowers everywhere. -‐ She also despite the intellectual because only with the physical perception people can come in contact with nature. Yes -‐ Molly is lying in the bed and she is thinking of the day when Leopold asked her to marry him. -‐ She explains why she wanted to marry him: 1. Leopold was a man who understands women 2. She knows she could always managed him to do what she wants. -‐ She is thinking about many other things, such as the game the sailor played, the Spanish girl whit the red dress, the multiethnic population of Gibraltar, the market of Gibraltar, the donkeys, the colors of the sea in the sunset… -‐ She is not really thinking about Leopold. The memory of Leopold proposal is mixed with the memory of another man because Leopold wasn’t in Gibraltar. So she is thinking to her first lover and also to the day of L. proposal. -‐ The sexual motif: YES: to Leopold proposal to marry him, to Leopold making love with him, to her first lover and yes of the conclusion of love-‐making. -‐ The other motif is the presence of FLOWERS -‐ She is lively, she loves life and everything is connected to life. Molly is predominantly sensual (sight/smell in flowers, taste in cake, touch in sex, hearing in music) -‐ There are 2 sexual acts, one at the beginning and one at the end. è In the early 20th century it wasn’t possible to talk about women and sex, they were censured! Women couldn’t even fall in love before marriage.