James Joyce: Life and Literary Works, with a Focus on Dubliners, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce: Life and Literary Works, with a Focus on Dubliners e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born into a middle-class Catholic family in Dublin. After attending Jesuit schools, he enrolled (iscritto) at university College Dublin in 1898, where he graduated in 1902. Throughout the 1890s, the Joyce family suffered from financial problems. The year 1891 was crucial for Irish history as well as for Joyce's literary career. Charles Stewart Parnell, a leader who had strongly supported the Irish cause for independence from England, died, leaving a whole nation in mourning (in lutto). Parnell's death was also the inspiration for Joyce' first known literary work, a poem accusing all those who had turned against him. From then on, betrayal became an almost obsessive theme in both the author's life and his work. The 1890s were also crucial to Ireland as the growing nationalist movement was spreading, taking forms which were not only political but also cultural and literary, but Joyce considered this cause too provincial to be served. He also saw Catholicism, another bastion of Irishness, as one of the reasons for Ireland's backwardness (arretratezza). After graduating, he left Ireland for the first time going to Paris to study medicine but when his mother was dying, Joyce went back to be with her. Her death proved a traumatic event in Joyce's life, as can be seen in the first pages of Ulysses (1922), where Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's literary alter ego) has nightmares about his dying mother and feels guilty for not having prayed at her bedside. On 16 June 1904, Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who became his life-long companion but whom he married only in 1931. With Nora, he left Ireland in 1904, remaining in this self-imposed exile, with a few brief exceptions, for the rest of his life. After a short stay in Pula, the couple settled in Trieste, where they remained until 1920 and where their two children were born. Joyce's job as a teacher put him into contact with Italo Svevo, who was at the time struggling to have his first novel, Senilità published. Joyce himself was trying to have his collection of short stories, Dubliners, printed but the book was constantly rejected as the stories were deemed (considerate) scandalous. It was not until 1914 that the collection was finally published. In the meanwhile, Joyce was also working on his semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this case, also thanks to the help of Irish poet William Butler Yeats and of Ezra Pound, the novel was first serialised and then published in one volume in 1916. When World War I broke out, he moved with his family to Zurich. At that time, Joyce was already working on his masterpiece, Ulysses, which he continued to write for a couple of years after settling in Paris in 1920. World War Il forced him to resettle in Zurich, where he died on 13 January 1941. DUBLINERS (1914) STRUCTURE Dubliners is a collection of short stories written between 1904 and 1907 and published for the first time in 1914. Joyce wanted his tales (racconti) to have a symmetrical organization as well as a principle of thematic development, so that they could form a chapter in the “moral history” of the country. Therefore, the fifteen stories of Dubliners are divided into four consecutive sections: the “stories of childhood”, the “stories of adolescence” (Eveline), the “stories of mature life” and the “stories of public life”. The last story The Dead, which is also the longest, forms a sort coda to the whole collection. The titles of the stories give a sense of relative anonymity and insignificance which is reflected also in the protagonists, a large number of whom are either anonymous or known by a single name, as though they had not yet developed an identity worthy of a name. The very title Dubliners is generic, revealing Joyce' intention to extend the fate of namelessness of the characters to all inhabitants of the city. The merging of different voices creates an orchestral effect and the combination of stories acts as the group portrait of a whole community. So Dubliners is not only a series of sketches of Dublin but also a book about human fate, in which the microcosm described is a model of all human lite. In August 1904, Joyce announced not only a transformation of the short story as a form, but he also introduced a few of the stylistic and thematic features of the collection. With the word “epicleti”, which comes from the Catholic mass, Joyce is declaring his intention to transform ordinary events, daily gestures, into something different, something more meaningful, as though those seemingly insignificant details acquired a symbolic value, transcending their immediate meaning. Moreover, by using the word “paralysis”, Joyce reveals that the main subject of his stories will be the immobility of a city, which was, at the time, Britain's "'neglected little sister”, a colony which had increasingly lost its influence and was falling to achieve independence. STYLE AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES Joyce stated that Dubliners is written in a "style of scrupulous meanness", which expresses the author's intention of achieving an effect of verisimilitude. He used, for example, names of actual pubs and hotels,