James Joyce and "The Dubliners", Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce and "The Dubliners" e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE - LIFE DUBLIN: 1882-1904 ● 1882, born in Dublin, the eldest of 4 boys and 6 girls. Well-educated in a Jesuit school ● 1902, modern language degree at University College ● 1903, he spent some time in Paris where he intended to begin a writing career, but his mother’s fatal illness brought him back to Dublin ● he published his first short story, The Sisters, which would have been the opening story of Dubliners ● 16 June 1904, he had his first date with Nora Barnacle, a 20 yo chambermaid. This date is now the ‘’Bloomsday’’ of Ulysses TRIESTE: 1905-1915 ● 1905, the couple settled in Trieste where Joyce began teaching English and made friends with Italo Svevo. They had 2 children: Giorgio and Lucia ● the year in Trieste were difficult because of the financial problems and disappointments from the publishers who considered his prose obscene ● 1907, Chamber Music, 36 short poems ● 1914, Dubliners, 15 short stories. The novels weren’t successful but caught the interest of Ezra Pound, an American poet, who appreciated his unconventional style and voice. Ezra helped him print A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a semi-autobiographical novel. In the same year, he wrote Exiles, a naturalistic drama ZURICH: 1915-1920 ● 1915, he was forced to move to Zurich as he was a British national in Austrian-occupied Trieste. ● he still had financial problems, but in1917 he received his first anonymous donation which enabled him to continue writing ● 1918, Ulysses appeared in The Little Review but was suspended for obscenity in 1920 PARIS: 1920-1940 ● 1920, he moved to Paris ● 1922, the American-born bookseller Sylvia Beach published a limited edition of Ulysses (followed by other editions in 1924,-34,-37). The novel was a success, admired by Pound, Yeats, and T.S. Eliot as ‘’the work of a genius’’ and ‘’the most important expression of modern age’’ ● 1931, Nora and he got married ● Lucia’s mental illness began to get worse and, even thou Joyce encouraged her love for painting, drawing, and dancing, she had to be sent to a mental hospital outside Paris ● the last decades of his life were very painful because of Lucia’s illness, his father’s death and his increasing blindness due to an eye operation in 1925. However, he continued to write and published Finnegans Wake in 1939, an immediate success ZURICH: 1940-1941 ● 1940, when France was occupied by the Germans, Joyce, and his family returned to Zurich ● 1941, he died due to an intestinal operation. He was buried in Zurich. THE PROSE THE CITY OF DUBLIN Even though he abandoned Dublin at the age of 22, it remained the protagonist of his stories. All his works were settled in Ireland, mostly in Dublin, with the aim to portray ordinary people, ordinary life, and ordinary things in order to represent the whole man’s mental, emotional, and biological reality fusing it with the new modern age consciousness. THE REBELLION AGAINST THE CHURCH In spite of his Jesuit education, he really criticizes Catholicism, accusing the Church of having taken possession of Irish minds. The rebellion of the artistic-heretic against the official doctrine also represented the conflict between a son and his parents linked to the quest for his artistic potentialities. Also, Percy was a rebel, but in contrast with Joyce, he didn’t suffer what he rebelled against. A COSMOPOLITAN AUTHOR He was more interested in Europe rather than all the political and literary (W.B. Yeats) movements for freeing Ireland from English dominance. He considered himself a European more than an Irishman. He believed that the only way to increase Ireland’s awareness was by offering a realistic portrait from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint THE STYLE He was influenced by French Symbolists and T.S. Eliot in believing in the impersonality of the artist. His task is now to render life objectively in order to give a true image of it. This led to the isolation of the artist from society (he’s not a prophet) and the use of different points of view and narrative techniques as he does not express the author’s pov: ● realism, disciplined prose, and direct speech in Dubliners ● interior monologue with two levels of narration in Ulysses ● extreme interior monologue in Finnegans Wake Language became a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical connections. Reality became the place of psychological projections, symbolic archetypes, and cultural knowledge. A SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTION OF TIME The facts are explored from different points of view simultaneously and are presented as clues and not through the voice of an omniscient narrator. His stories open in media res with the analysis of a particular moment, and the character's portrait is based on introspection rather than on description. Time is not perceived as objective but as subjective. KEYWORDS ● ordinary people, ordinary life, ordinary things ● rebellion ● realism ● isolation ● paralysis of the character, of Dublin, of Ireland =/= inept in Italo Svevo, focused on the character