Scarica James Joyce: Life, Literary Production, and Thematic Analysis of Dubliners and Ulysses e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE * 1882 James Joyce was born in Dublin. * His life was characterised by many trips took him in France, in Switzerland and also in Italy, where he met the Italian novelist Italo Svevo. * 1941 Joyce died. Literary production In 1914 James Joyce published short stories Dubliners, then published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in 1922 he published his masterpiece Ulysses. Interior monologue and epiphany The writings of Joyce make frequent use of interior monologue, both direct and indirect. The writer almost disappears and the readers find themselves directly inside a character's mind. Another characteristic of Joyce's writing is the use of epiphanies. An epiphany is a sudden revelation in which, according to the author, ‘the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant'. It is a moment in which a spiritual awakening is experienced. (spiritual manifestation) This can be compared to Woolf's idea of 'vision'. Dubliners Joyce's first short stories were published in 1914 in a collection called Dubliners, in a portrait of the lives of ordinary people in Dublin. The stories are divided into four groups that correspond to four ‘phases' of life: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The feeling of paralysis is a recurrent theme in all the stories and that many of the characters experience as a result of being tied to narrow cultural, social and political traditions. Other characteristics of the stories in Dubliners are: the absence of a narrative voice, description of characters' inner thoughts and use of symbolism. The Dead The Dead begins with an after-Christmas dinner party, and the main protagonist is Gabriel Conroy. Gabriel goes to the party with his wife Gretta. At the end of the party, when they reach their hotel room, he realises that she is crying: in this moment she had a sad 'epiphany', a revelation related to her past. Listening to an old Irish song sung by one of the guests, she remembered her first and perhaps only true love, Michael Furey, and she realises he thinks he died for her. On hearing this story, Gabriel has his own 'epiphany'. When Gretta falls asleep, he looks outside the window where the snow is falling. He realises the insignificance both of his own life, and of those around him; they will all fade and die and be forgotten. Features and themes The Dead is the last story in Dubliners and here we have symbolic meaning: Gabriel, for example, is also the name of the archangel who sounded the trumpet at the last judgement. And the party takes place around the 6th of January. Joyce used indirect interior monologue. The central event of the story is Gretta epiphany, because of that Gabriel, in his epiphany, reflected and realised that he never really knew his wife. Ulysses This is considerate the masterpiece of Joyce. It's a novel of 18 episodes, all set in Dublin. The three main characters are middle-aged advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, his wife, Molly Bloom, and a young school teacher and aspiring writer called Stephen Dedalus. The novel tells the story of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, who walks around Dublin and meets various people along the way, including Stephen Dedalus, who he visits a brothel with and gets drunk before finally going home to bed with his wife Molly. The various 'journeys" of Bloom, Stephen and Molly are also voyages through the internal sea of their own consciousness.
