Scarica James Joyce and the second period of his literary production: "Ulysses" e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE- ULYSSES (page 337) Ulysses was published in 1922. The second period of Joyce’s writings sees the transition from a traditional approach to a stage of experimentation, reached in symbolism and allegory. It is the logical consequence of the previous phase, since the themes and the setting of the new works are the same. What changes is the language, which increasingly rejects logical sequences and conventional syntax. The best known work of the second period is Ulysses, which is an immense multi-layered complex work. It takes as its material a single day, June 16th 1904, in the life of three Dubliners (two men and a woman) and its divided into three corresponding parts. The day is very meaningful for Joyce, in fact it is the day in which he met for the second time his girlfriend, Nora Barnacle, and they decided to stay together. The central character in the first part is Steven Dedalus, the joycean alter ego. Steven is a young man with intellectual ambitions, the enemy of his own country and a martyr to art. The second part is dominated by the figure of Leopold Bloom, the Ulysses of the title. A middle age married man who wanders around Dublin as Ulysses wandered around the Mediterranean, encountering adventures which are parallel to those of Homeric hero. The 3rd part is dominated by his wife Molly Bloom who corresponds to Ulysses wife, Penelope, just as Steven Dedalus represents Ulysses son, Telemacus. The novel begins with Steven evicted from his home and forced to wander the streets in search for the father and the home. In his wanderings he meets Bloom, who “adopt” him by offering to take him home and giving shelter. The parallel with the Homeric poem is developed in a more detailed way in each of the sections (or chapters), which are 18 in all, each one corresponding to one of the episodes in the Odyssey, but do not in the same order. The point of the parallel between the two books is that which enables Joyce to give his book a symbolic and permanent structure and at the same time enables him to document with details the events and impressions of a single day in the life of his characters. Joyce is also suggesting, by means of his parallelism, that Bloom is a modern Ulysses and an archetypal hero who can stand for humanity, for “everyman”. The circumstances have changed but the human quest continuous unchanged. THE TECHNIQUE JOYCE ADOPTS TO REPRESENT HIS CHARACTERS It is the complete experiment of the stream of consciousness method, which attempts to represent the natural, disordered yet pattern sequences of thoughts and feelings as they crop up in the individual mind, uncensored or incompletely uncensored by rational control. In his use of stream of consciousness technique, in particular in the interior monologue, Joyce avails himself of a variety of devices, such as the lack of punctuation, onomatopoeia words, and of a variety of styles, ranging from dialogue to interior monologue and unspoken soliloquies. By doing so, Joyce is able to penetrate into the consciousness of his characters and express their thoughts and feelings.
