JAMES JOYCE AND ULYSSES, Sbobinature di Inglese

Scarica JAMES JOYCE AND ULYSSES e più Sbobinature in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce James Joyce was an Irish, modernist writer who wrote in a ground-breaking style that was known both for its complexity and explicit content. Born as James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in February 1882 in Dublin (Ireland), Joyce was one of the most influent writers of the 20th century, whose masterpiece was: Ulysses, considered nowadays as one of the finest novels ever written. His exploration of language and new literary forms showed not only his genius as a writer but also create a fresh approach for novelists, one that drew heavily on Joyce's love of the stream-of-consciousness technique and the examination of big events through small happenings in everyday lives. Joyce came from a big family. He was the eldest of ten children born to John Stanislaus Joyce and his wife Marry Murray Joyce. His father, while a talented singer (he reportedly had one of the finest tenor voices in all of Ireland), did not provide a stable family. He liked to drink and his lack of attention to the family finances meant the Joyces never had much money. From an early age, Joyce showed not only exceeding intelligence but also a gift for writing and a passion for literature. He taught himself Norwegian so he could read Henrik Ibsen's plays in the language they had been written and spent his free time devouring Dante, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Because of his intelligence, Joyce's family pushed him to get an excellent education. Largely educated by Jesuits, Joyce attended the Irish schools of Clongowes Wood College and later Belvedere College before finally landing at University College Dublin, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on modern languages. The rebellion against the Church: In spite of his Jesuit education, Joyce challenged Catholicism. His hostility towards the Church was the revolt of the artist-heretic against the official doctrine, or the struggle between an aesthete-heretic and a provincial Church which had taken possession of Irish minds. But the conflict was even more painful; it was like a conflict between a son and his parents linked to the quest for his artistic potentialities. Early Works: 'Dubliners' and 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' Joyce's relationship with his native country was a complex one and after graduating he left Ireland for a voluntary exile in Paris where he hoped to study medicine. He returned, however, not long after upon learning that his mother had become sick. She died in 1903. Joyce stayed in Ireland for a brief time, long enough to meet Nora Barnacle, a hotel house cleaner who later became his wife. Around this time, Joyce also had his first short story published in the Irish Homestead magazine. The publication picked up two more Joyce works, but this start of a literary career was not enough to keep him in Ireland and in late 1904, he and Barnacle moved to the Italian seaport city of Trieste. There, Joyce taught English and learned Italian, one of 17 languages he could speak. All the while, though, Joyce continued to write and in 1914, he published his first book, Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories. Two years later, Joyce put out a second book, the novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. While not a huge commercial success, the book caught the attention of the American poet, Ezra Pound, who praised Joyce for his unconventional style and voice. 'Ulysses' and Controversy: The same year that the Dubliners came out, Joyce embarked on what would prove to be his masterpiece: Ulysses. The story recounts a single day in Dublin. The date: June 16, 1904, the same day that Joyce and Barnacle met. On the surface, the novel follows the story three central characters: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly Bloom, as well as the city life that unfolds around them. But Ulysses is also a modern retelling of Homer's Odyssey, with the three main characters serving as modern versions of Telemachus, Ulysses and Penelope. With its advanced use of interior monologue, the novel manages to guide the reader into Bloom's sometimes lurid mind but also opened the way to Joyce's use of stream of consciousness, as a literary technique and create the course for a whole new genre of novel [*]. But Ulysses is not an easy read, and upon its publication in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, an American expat who owned a bookstore in the city, the book drew a large number of criticises both positive than negatives. Long before Ulysses ever came out, a debate broke out over the topic of the novel. Parts of the story had appeared in publications in the United States and the United Kingdom, the book was banned for several years after it was published in France. In the United States, Ulysses’ supposed obscenity forced the Post Office to retire the issues of the magazine that had published Joyce's work. [*]: Remember that the modern novel was based on a new conception of the time considered as a stream. We remember the influences of James, Bergson and Einstein who revaluate the concept of time. The concept of two type of time (interior and historical), the absence of an omniscient narrator, the lack of coherence and the presence of interior monologue. Later Career and 'Finnegans Wake': Eventually, Joyce and his family settled into a new life in Paris, which is where they were living when Ulysses was published. Success, however, could not protect Joyce from health issues. His most problematic condition concerned his eyes. He suffered from a constant stream of ocular illnesses, went through a host of surgeries, and for a number of years was near blindness. At times, Joyce was forced to write in red crayon on sheets of large paper. In 1939, Joyce published Finnegans Wake, his long-awaited follow-up novel, which, with its myriad of puns and innovative words, tried to be an even more difficult read than his previous work. Still, the book was an immediate success, earning "book of the week" honours in the United States and the United Kingdom not long after debuting. A year after Finnegans' publication, Joyce and his family were on the move again, this time to southern France due to the advance of the coming Nazi invasion of Paris. Eventually, the family ended back in Zurich. Death: Sadly, Joyce never saw the conclusion of World War II. Following an intestinal operation, the writer died at the age of 59 on January 13, 1941, at the those are grouped in 3 section, the first one is called “The Telemachia”, in this section we first met Stephen Dedalus, that Joyce has already presented in his previous work “A portrait of an artist as a young man”, so we can say that Stephen is Joyce’s alter ego. Both of them are artist in search for their autonomy, their freedom of expression, but also freedom in general far away from religious and social pression, as a matter of fact the name Dedalus is referred to the ancient myth of Dedalus the inventor of the wings, that also means freedom, liberty. Stephen that in the story is in search of a house is deprived of a father figure, another link with the Odyssey, in particular with Telemachus, whose father (Ulysses) was travelling around the Mediterranean see, in order to find his home. ~ The second section is called “Odyssey” where we find for the first time Leopold Bloom, who is the Ulysses of the title, this Jewish Advertisement agent who lives his natural life. ~ The third section is called “Nostos” where we meet Leopold Bloom’s wife, Molly Bloom that can be compared to Ulysses’ wife, Penelope but while Penelope is a submissive character, extremely faithful enough to spin and parade the canvas waiting for her husband, despite the presence of the Proci, Molly on the other side is a liberal sensuous women, who is unfaithful to his husband who cheats with his manager. Naturally, the novel has a non-real plot, because the series of events seem to be insignificant, banal and trivial. All this because every action becomes relevant as it is seen from the character’s mind, so the protagonist of the story is not the fact, the event, the situation but the way the fact is told, the narrative process, the evolution of the novel as a text and not as a story. So, we can say that all the novel revolves around the stream of consciousness and on the stream of consciousness technique. The interior monologue takes the reader to be a direct observer of what happened in the characters mind. Joyce as said before, Joyce, has as models Omer’s poems, as a matter of fact we can compare the two works, the misadventure of Ulysses and the wondering of Odysseus, but in particular we can compare the always challenging life of Odysseus with the extreme normal life of Leopold. So, we can say that Joyce uses the mythical method, that is to say he reworks an ancient myths that is now debased, as a matter of fact while Odysseus is an hero because he has to face challenge and makes choices that has as a price his life, Leopold on the other hand is an anti-hero, a man with no place and qualities, a man without values and ideals who has to confront himself with the emptiness, the banalities of his life. So, we can say that Joyce uses the mythical method to stress the contrast between the glorious past and the modern life, represented as without values, stability, characterized by sterility and banality. We can also say that Leopold Bloom can be considered as a hero, but a hero of the age of anxiety, so a proponent of that values and that ideals, completely opposed to the ancient and epic ones. We have also to say that the myth in general enclose a meaning, a lesson, a model to follow, in this case Odysseus that is a brave hero, full of ideals and values. So, the reworking of this myth according to Joyce could improve the contemporary world, he also has a universal significance, just like Dublin that become a microcosm of all the world, Leopold Bloom that is a man morally and spiritually empty and stands for humanity. We can also say that one of the influences of Joyce is Vico and his cyclicity of history. Another analogy is the theme of the voyage, the journey as a quest for the meaning of the life but also as a voyage in the consciousness and in the character mind. A revolutionary prose: Ulysses is famous for many things, from its Complex structure to its difficulty, from its brilliantly realized characters to its “obscenities” but what really marks it is its revolutionary prose. In fact, Joyce combined several methods to present a variety of matters. The stream of consciousness technique; the cinematic technique with the literary equivalent of close-up, flashbacks, tracking shorts, suspension of speech, question and answer, dramatic dialogue, and the juxtaposition of events , with the consequent construction of order and unity form their randomness, enabled the writer to render his character’s inner life creating the so-called “collage technique”, quite similar to the techniques used by the cubist artist who depicted a scene from all perspective. In Ulysses, Joyce brought to perfection the interior monologue employing both the two levels of narration, one external to the character’s mind, and the other internal, and only the mind level of narration, with the character’s thoughts flowing freely without any interruption coming from the external world. The language used is rich in puns, images, contrasts, paradoxes, juxtapositions, interruptions, false clues, and symbolic; the range of vocabulary and registers is amazing, moreover in almost every episode slang, catchphrases, nicknames, even expressions taken from advertising are present and used to voice the unspoken activity of the mind. Foreign words, literary quotations and allusions to other texts are other important linguistic features.