JAMES JOYCE, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica JAMES JOYCE e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce Life and works James Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. He was educated at Jesuit schools, then University College in Dublin where he studied French, Italian and German languages and literatures and English literature. He graduated in modern languages in 1902. His interest was in European culture and he thought of himself as a European rather than an Irish man; he believed that the only way to increase Ireland’s awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European cosmopolitan viewpoint. He spent some time in Paris and in 1903 he came back to Dublin where he met and fell in love with the twenty-year-old Nora Bornacle in 1904. They moved to Italy, settling in Trieste where Joyce began teaching English and made friends with Italo Svevo. Joyce and Nora had two children and married in 1931. The years in Trieste were difficult, filled with disappointment and financial problems. He started to publish his work in book form: Chamber Music (1907, 36 short poems) Dubliners (1914, collection of short stories all about Dublin and Dublin’s life) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916, semi-autobiographical novel) Exiles (1914, naturalistic drama) In 1917 he received several anonymous donations which enabled him to continue writing Ulysses (1922, Paris) Finnegans Wake (1939) He died in Switzerland in January 1941. Ordinary Dublin Joyce set all his works mostly in the city of Dublin. He wanted to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. By portraying these ordinary Dubliners he represented the whole of man’s mental, emotional and biological reality. The rebellion against the Church The meticulous mind of Joyce was formed by the Jesuit, but he challenged Catholicism. His hostility was the revolt of the artist-heretic against the official doctrine, because the Church had taken possession of Irish minds; but it was also a conflict between a son and his parents linked to the quest for his artistic potentialities. A poor eye-sight James Joyce was almost blind. This physical problem was compensated by his sense of ear, and the sound of words was very important to him. A subjective perception of time Joyce was a Modernist writer. He re-worked his themes: they become gradually less relevant than the “narrative” itself; the facts are always explored from different points of view simultaneously, and are presented as “clues” and not through the voice of an omniscient narrator. Joyce’s stories and novels open in medias res, with the analysis of a particular moment and the portrait of the character is based on introspection rather than on description. Time is not perceived as objective but as subjective, leading to psychological change. The impersonality of the artist Joyce believed in the impersonality of the artists (as did T.S. Eliot) because was influenced by the French authors Flaubert and Baudelaire. The artist’s task was to describe life objectively in order to give a true image of it, even if this behaviour led him to the isolation and detachment from society. Joyce used different points of view and narrative techniques appropriate to the several characters portrayed. His style, technique and language developed from the realism and the disciplined prose of Dubliners. The whole novel takes place on a single day, Thursday, June 16, 1904 which was special to Joyce because in this day he met with Nora Barnacle, his future wife. During this day, three main characters wake up, have various encounters in Dublin and go to sleep eighteen hours later. The central character, Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged advertising canvasser and non- practicing Jew, is Joyce's common man. He leaves his home to have breakfast and returns at two the following morning; during these hours he turns up in many streets, attends a funeral, endures misadventures and delight. During his wanderings he meets Stephen Dedalus, who become his adopted son: the alienated common man saves the alienated artist from a brothel (bordello) and takes him home where the paralysis of their fatigue prevents them from achieving a personal communion. Finally there's Bloom's wife, Molly, a singer who is planning an afternoon of adultery whit her music director. The relation to odissey Ulysse is related to Homer's Odissey, that Joyce used as a structural framework for his book, organising its characters and events around Homer's model, with Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen as his son Telemachus and Molly as the faithful Penelope. Ulysses is divided into three parts and eighteen episodes: - Telemachiad (chapters 1-3) - Odyssey (chapters 4-15) - Nostos (chapters 16-18) The setting Ulysses is a detailed account of ordinary life on a ordinary Dublin day and Joyce planned each movement of his character as he was playing chess. He placed them in houses he knew, drinking in pubs he had frequented and made the very air of Dublin, the atmosphere, the feeling and the place inseparable from his human characters, so Dublin becomes itself a character in this novel. The representation of human nature Stephen Dedalus, Mr Bloom and Mrs Bloom aren't only individuals, but represent two aspects of human nature: - Stephen is pure intellect, embodies every young man seeking maturity and he associates things by resemblance in his stream of consciousness. - Mrs Bloom represents the flesh, because she identifies herself totally with her sensual nature and fecundity. - Mr Bloom, uniting the extremes, is everybody, the whole of mankind. The theme of the novel is moral: human life means sufferings, falling but also struggling to rise and seek the good. The mythical method Joyce's Ulysses is a new form of prose based on the mythical method, resulting from the progress made by psychology and anthropology, rather than on the narrative method. This allowed the author to make a parallel with the Odyssey and give to the book a symbolic, cross-temporal meaning; Homer's myth was used to enlarge by similarities and difference the actions and people of a Dublin day, to express the universal in the particular. A revolutionary prose Ulysses is famous for its complex structure, for its brilliantly realized characters, for its obscenities and its revolutionary prose. In fact, Joyce combined several methods: the stream of consciousness technique; the cinematic technique, flashbacks, suspension of speech, dramatic dialogue and the juxtaposition of events with the so-called collage technique. In Ulysses Joyce used the interior monologue employing two levels of narration: - one external to the character's mind - the other internal, with the character's thoughts flowing freely without any interruption coming from the external world.