James Joyce: Life, Modernism, and Dubliners (1914), Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce: Life, Modernism, and Dubliners (1914) e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE AND DUBLINERS (1914) ➢ James Joyce’s life James Joyce was born in 1882, in Dublin, from a middle-class Catholic family -> he was educated by the Jesuits and attended University College of Dublin; he got graduated in Modern Languages in 1902. He went to Paris after graduation -> in 1903 he came back to Dublin due to his mother illness -> in 1904 he left Dublin with his partner, Nora Barnacle -> they had two children and got married in 1931; in the same period, he got a job in Trieste. In Trieste he made friends with Italo Svevo -> Joyce was a reference point for the Italian writer both in writing and in teaching -> in fact, Joyce taught English to Svevo, who needed to know the language to travel due to his work; Joyce also sustained Svevo as a friend when Svevo’s works did not gain the success he deserved. Svevo was so moved by Joyce's sincere praise that he took up writing seriously again and went on to write some of his most admired work -> it was thanks to Joyce that Svevo got to redeem himself in Paris. Joyce got some problems with printers and publishers -> many of them sustained some of Joyce’s elements in his works were obscene. In 1915 Joyce and his family moved to Zurich and then to Paris, in 1920, where they remained until German occupation in 1940 -> they went back to Zurich, where he died the following year, in 1941. During this 25 years period, he faced economic and eyesight problems -> he got anonymously financed to keep writing his magnus opus, the Ulysses. He was not that interested in using literature as a means of propaganda for freeing Ireland from English domination -> he focused in faraway European cultures. He firmly thought awareness increase came from a realistic portrait of European life. ➢ Joyce and Modernism He is considered one of the main representatives of Modernism. His writing is very complex -> he wants to give an objective vision of life itself, but he goes beyond the simple realism: he analyses the reactions his characters have in front of a precise event in a precise moment and what consequences this has on the inner world of the character itself -> his novels open in medias res. The characters portraits are based on the introspection the writer adopts on them rather than the simple use of descriptions. He presents different points of view at the same time without using the omniscient narrator. Time is advised in a subjective way -> the present and the past are totally mixed (time in “La Coscienza di Zeno” of Italo Svevo). His style and language develop from the seeming realism he presents in Dubliners, of which ww will do a deeper analysis later. Joyce interpreted the spiritual crisis that affected people after the First World War in terms of the uncertainty of knowledge and the fragmentation of experience -> this leads to the exploitation of interior monologue (Luigi Pirandello). With Svevo we can talk about interior monologues, but with Joyce we can must talk about streams-of-consciousness -> monologues follow grammatical rules and punctuation and the disposition of the sentences are all things considered is neat; streams-of- consciousness have no logical or grammatical order. What links them is the awareness of middle-class’ values crisis; anyway, in Joyce we can find a quest of “Avant-garde” solutions in the linguistic field that Svevo never worried about.