James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce and Virginia Woolf e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce He’s considered as one of the most famous novelists of the 20th century. He broke with all the rules and conventions of the novels and prose. Joyce also wrote a collection of short stories: Dubliners. It’s important because there’s the portrait of the modern world, described with the same disenchantment and feeling of meaninglessness. The title is also important, Joyce himself was from Dublin and left it because he thought it was the center of paralysis. Irish society was empty and sterile. Eveline The narrative is divided in 2 moments: 1) She’s looking out of the window and starts to think 2) Last paragraph: we can see the strange unexplainable She meets Frank, a sailor from Buenos Aires. The theme is always the same: the characters are affected by a sort of paralysis which is the incapability of being happy. They live a sad, meaningless life. Eveline is beaten up by her father: she’s unhappy. It’s not a revolutionary piece of work: the techniques are rather traditional. In this story nothing really happens: it's a typical thing of modernism. The focus is on the psyche side of the character and on the description of their thoughts. We have a couple of new things: - The fact that, if you pay attention to the way Eveline thinks, you can understand some links between the images (however, they’re usually almost all associations of ideas). Her thoughts are not always irrational. There’s some rationality, but at the same time she’s also perceiving by looking out. - The new element is the epiphany: it’s the realization of the main character, given by an association of ideas, that they are in a situation of paralysis. We have to remember that it’s not a thought, but an event. Where's the epiphany here? Here the epiphany is represented by the moment in which Eveline listens to the time in the street, which was the same that played the night her mother died: Eveline remembers that she has promised her mother that she’d never go away from her family (lines 85-90). Virginia Woolf