Scarica James Joyce: The Irish Author's Life and Literary Development e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, so he was not English but Irish. The fact that he was born in Dublin, that is to say in the Catholic part of Ireland, is extremely relevant because it deeply influenced all his career. According to many critics, Dublin is the real protagonist of all his works, because Joyce had a love and hate relationship with this town. He traveled a lot in his youth: he visited Italy, Paris and here he realized that he could no longer bear the sense of oppression and closeness that he was living in Ireland. According to Joyce the fault (colpa) for that sense of oppression was of the Catholic Church, and so he deeply criticized it all his life long. So he decided to move from Ireland to Italy, where he felt more freedom. He settled in Trieste with his wife Nora Barnacle, to whom he dedicated all his works. In Trieste, he worked as an English teacher and here he met the famous Italian writer Italo Svevo. It was not only a close friendship, it was also a professional collaboration in which they supported each other. In those years Svevo was facing problems in publishing Senilità, whereas Joyce was facing problems in publishing his masterpiece Ulysses, which was considered obscene and scandalous by criticism. The works written by James Joyce must be remembered in the right order, because to each one of these works corresponds a step in the development in his art: the first one is Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories; the second work is a novel, A Portrait; the third is his masterpiece, Ulysses; the fourth novel is Finnegans Wake. Dubliners is considered traditional in the structure, every story has a beginning, a development and an end, in each story you can recognize the characters, the verbal tenses used are accessible. Soon after Dubliners, in A Portrait you already recognized some typical characteristics of the Stream of consciousness novel. The exploitation of these elements are in Ulysses, in which his art achieved maturity. Instead, Finnegans Wake is seen as the end and a sort of devolution of his artistic characteristics. The writings of Joyce make frequent use of interior monologue: the flow of thoughts of characters. Through this technique, the writer almost disappears and the readers find themselves directly inside a character's mind. Another technique that is typical in the Stream of consciousness novel is the epiphany, that is to say the sudden revelation of a hidden truth usually provoked by an external event. In all of his works, James Joyce introduced an epiphanic moment, that is to say in which the protagonist or one of the characters reveals something that had been hidden so far. Dubliners is a portrait of people in Dublin. The stories are arranged (organizzate) in four groups that correspond to four phases of life: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. In this work a typical theme is paralysis, that is to say the general feeling of life in Dublin: it is social, political, economic, cultural, physical and religious. Paralysis is the reason why he decided to escape from Dublin. He believed that Dubliners and Irish people had no desires, wishes, hope, and he could not share that of pessimism. Stylistically speaking the stories in Dubliners are written in a traditional way. However, it already contains some elements of Joyce’s more experimental later work. Some clues are: the absence of a moralizing narrative voice, the description of characters’ inner thoughts and use of symbolism. Each story is told from the perspective of a particular character, rather than through an omniscient narrator. The protagonists in Ulysses are Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and the writer Stephen Dedalus, who is the protagonist also of A Portrait. The difference of this character is that in A Portrait he is a young artist, instead in the Ulysses he has grown up. Joyce uses this title to indicate that as well as Ulysses by Homer traveled in space, Leopold Bloom makes travel in his mind. Joyce claimed that the modern traveler doesn’t need to start a physical journey to discover new lands, but he must face a psychological one. In the Ulysses of Joyce the protagonist challenges the limits of the mind, not the limits of space, so this is a wandering in the mind. In fact the story
