James Joyce: The Irish Author of 'Dubliners' and 'Ulysses', Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce: The Irish Author of 'Dubliners' and 'Ulysses' e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! 1 JAMES JOICE Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, in a well-off Catholich family, whose fortunes declined together with Parnell's decline, since his father was his supporter, because he was involved in a love affair with another man's wife (the church condemned him). Joyce was educated at a Jesuit school, where he learned to be disciplined and strict, and attended the university of Dublin, where he studied modern languages. Since he believed that the atmosphere in Ireland was oppressed, because of the church and politics, to become an artist, at the age of 22 he moved first to Paris, then Pola and finally to Trieste. He was poor, so he had to work, firstly in a bank and then private lessons. On 16th June 1904 he met his future wife Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid in a hotel; they had 2 children but married only in 1932, and he chose the day they met to describe one day of the life of Ulysses's main character. His wife is very important to him, she was the love of his life and they stayed together all their life. In Trieste he finished his first two novels: Dubliners and A portrait of the artist as a young man. In 1914 he published "Dubliner", written in 1904, a collection of 15 short stories set in Dublin; between 1914-15 he published in installments "Portrait of an artist as a young man", definitely published in 1916, a partly autobiographical novel. In the two novels there’s still a conventional plot with a bit of the new internal monologue. Before moving to Zurich he settled in Rome and Triste where he met Italo Svevo. During WWI he moved to Zurich, where he had economic and health problems, in fact he had eye-operation against oncoming blindness. In 1919 he started publishing "Ulysses" his masterpiece, in a magazine directed by Thomas Eliot (main modern artist) in installments, but was banned because of oschenity; thanks to Sylvia Beach, the novel was published in 1922 in France in "Shakespeare & Co." bookshop. His following and last work was "Finnegans Wake", published in 1939, maybe incomplete and died in 1941 in Zurich. Even though he left Ireland forever to become an artist, he always wrote about his land and reproduced it with great care for precise details; he had to leave to better understand Ireland. Most important features The stories are set in Ireland, especially Dublin where he was born. He rebels against the Catholic Church. His novels concern the life experience of each individual and the human condition, all experiences that are key points of human life. Each character in his novels speaks a personal language that's suitable to his social class and, in order to record experiences, he uses all characters' points of view. He gives great importance to the inner world of the characters-> subjective point of view. Also time is subjective . His task was to render life objectively. Dublin The Dublin represented by Joyce is not fixed and static, it is «the revolutionary montage of “Dublins” through a range of historical juxtapositions and varied styles». - The 15 stories of the Dubliners, though set in the same city, are not united by their geography: each story has a singular location. - The evocation of his town in A Portrait is deeply influenced by Joyce’s prolonged temporal and spatial distance; Dublin is filtered through Stephen’s mind. - In Ulysses, Dublin overwhelms the reader. 2 Dubliners (1914) Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories. The first 14 stories had all been written by 1905, when the book was originally turned down by publishers; they thought it immortal for its pitiless portrait of Irish city life and also objected to the mention of real places and people in it. The last and longest story, The Dead, was finished by 1907. The complete collection, however, only came out in 1914. It was published in the newspaper The Irish Homestead by Joyce with the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus. Dubliners are described as afflicted people. All the stories are set in Dublin -> portrait of Dublin life. Joice decided to live abroad because he felt oppressed by the church and society to allow an artist to develop; in Dublin no one can escape because they are not aware of their condition or they can’t make a choice. The city for him is the center of paralysis. This "paralysis" is the paralysis of will, courage and self-knowledge that leads ordinary men and women to accept the limitations imposed by the social context they live in. The sense of paralysis, of stagnation, runs through all fifteen stories and is presented in four stages: childhood, youth, maturity and public life. The paralysis is: physical caused by external forces and moral linked to religion, politics and culture). The style of Dubliners is complex. It is realistic in describing characters, places, streets, pubs and idioms of contemporary Dublin. On the other hand, Joyce makes use of a subtle symbolic effect which gives the common object unpredicted depth and becomes the key to a new, more conscious, view of reality. (Naturalism combined with symbolism; double meaning of details.) Each story opens in medias res and is mostly told from the perspective of a character. He uses the free-direct speech and free-direct thought ->direct presentation of the character’s thoughts. Joyce himself coined the definition "epiphany" which means 'manifestation, showing’ to indicate the special moment in which a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation or an episode lead the character to a sudden self-realisation about himself / herself or about the reality surrounding him / her ->sudden revelation of an hidden truth. Evelin Eveline belongs to the group of short stories dealing with youth. In Dublin's stagnant life, however, youth is not synonymous with vitality and enthusiasm but quiet. The beginning of the story is typical: the day is dying, the young woman is watching the world go by under her window (as if she were an old person confined to home), and the sentence "She was tired" implies her tiredness with the life she is living rather than actual physical fatigue. As with the other stories of the 'youth group', this one too 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 and a miserable home to follow Frank, a sailor, to Buenos Aires. However, again as in the other 'youth group' stories, love goes wrong and is not an escape from the dreariness of Eveline's life. In the end, she does not have the courage to go aboard the ship that would take her and Frank to Buenos Aires. She just stands on the quay, unable to move, as if paralyzed. Characters: Eveline (passive, influenced by her family’s mentality), Her father (a violent and strict man) and Frank (a very kind, open-hearted and brave boy). The story opens in medias res; third-person narrator but Eveline’s point of view and subjective perception of time.