James Joyce e Virginia Woolf, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce e Virginia Woolf e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) James Joyce is one of the most important novelists of all time and one of the greatest innovators of prose writing of the 20th century. He was born in Dublin in 1882 to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray, who belonged to the Catholic middle class. In 1898 Joyce began studying Italian, French and English at University College Dublin, where he too began writing literary reviews and articles. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, who became his wife. The director of the Berlitz Institute in Trieste offered him a teaching position and Joyce moved to the city, where he worked on two literary works Dubliners (1914), and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In Trieste Joyce became friends with the Italian writer Italo Svevo, who greatly influenced Joyce's style and themes. In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, Joyce moved to Zurich, where he began work on Ulysses (1922). In 1920 Joyce moved to Paris, where he began work on his latest novel, Finnegans Sveglia (1939). After the Germans occupied France in 1940, Joyce and his family moved back to Zurich, where he died in 1941. Joyce is to be considered one of the greatest representatives of Modernism. His works reveal his complex relationship with Ireland, which he both loved and hated. For Joyce, Ireland was a country dominated by stagnation and stasis, but it was also his main source of inspiration: in all of his works Joyce drew inspiration from the people and places of Ireland, which he portrayed with vivid realism and attention. Dubliners Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories written in 1900 and published in 1914. They represent an ideal portrait of the Irish capital of the early 1900s. The stories can be divided into three main groups. The first three stories deal with the theme of childhood in which there is a strong sense of disappointment and failure. Another group deals with adulthood: dealing with issues such as man's inability to escape suffering and Irish passivity. The last group of stories portray the relationship between the Irish and collective institutions, such as politics and the Church. These stories also have the concept of paralysis. The latest story in the collection is titled The Dead. It is an implacable portrait of the Irish middle class, stuck in a condition of irresolvable mediocrity. The protagonist of the story, Gab Conroy, is the prototype of the mediocre Irish bourgeois, an individual who lives his life like a dead man. The Dublin that Joyce portrays is a static and provincial city, a place that lacks the international atmosphere of many other capitals. This affects the lives of the inhabitants, portrayed as imprisoned in a city that does not give them the opportunity to grow and develop their full potential as human beings. Beyond Dublin, what the Dubliners characters have in common is the nature of the failure they experience. All the Dubliners characters have a wish, and they try to make it come true by overcoming obstacles but in the end they give up because they don't have the will to turn their wish into action. This condition of inertia affects all Dubliners and is described by Joyce as 'paralysis', it is not just a physical condition: it is a spiritual crisis of the self, a lack of universal growth affecting the entire Irish nation. Simply put, it means spiritual and physical death. There is only one way to escape the paralysis affecting the Irish: the epiphany. It means "revelation" and "manifestation". Joyce uses it to refer to the moments in which the characters of Dubliners experience the revelation of their paralyzed condition. Unfortunately this revelation does not lead to a real change in their lives: it simply makes them more aware of how dead and paralyzed they are. Joyce's short stories are based on the rejection of the Victorian idea of the third person narrator and on the use of an internal narrative perspective: this means that each of the stories contained in Dubliners is told from the point of view of one of the characters. The realism that Joyce adopts is mixed with free direct speech and free direct thought. Ulysses (1922) Ulysses is a novel set in Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904. Its 18 "episodes" narrate the actions and interactions of three characters. Stephen Dedalus, protagonist of the first three episodes, grouped as Part I: 'The Telemachiad'. The next and main section (Episodes 4-15) is called "The Odyssey" and focuses on the urban wanderings of Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish advertising salesman. Finally, the third section, called Nostos, takes Leopold home to his loving but unfaithful wife Molly. Joyce's Ulysses is an epic novel that offers different visions of everyday life, personal attitudes and different reflections. His styles are many and varied; his language and structure are he likes to interrupt the structure of sentences like inventing words, delighting in sound patterns. Each episode proposes its own style and Joyce has indicated each episode with a title referring to a character or an episode of Homer's Odyssey, a time and a place, a part of the body (heart, liver, stomach...), a art (music, painting...), a colour, a symbol and a narrative technique. Joyce's constant references to Homer's Odyssey and to the world of ancient mythology add a layer of universality to the events narrated in the novel and ironically underline the squalid reality of modernity, devoid of the heroism of the ancient world. In this sense the 'mythical method' adopted by Joyce in Ulysses is very similar to that used by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land: Both writers use ancient myths to portray the modern world as a place where heroism has disappeared and barrenness reigns. His narrative style is all about the "stream of consciousness" technique. Using this narrative technique, Joyce's novel tries to understand the functioning of the mind of its protagonist, whose flow of ideas and thoughts is written on the page without any logic or rational organization. VIRGINIA WOOOF (1882-1941) Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of a Victorian man of letters, Sir Leslie Stephen, the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. As a woman, Virginia was unable to go to university, but she received an excellent home education, was surrounded by artists and writers, and became a writer herself. Of her novels, the best known are Mrs Dalloway (1925) and At the Lighthouse (1927), two works which show the influence that the theories of Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson had on Woolf's imagination. Woolf has used the stream-of-consciousness technique in her novels, which are like mental journeys focusing on the contrast between inner life and outer reality. When her mother died, Woolf had a serious breakdown: and it is considered the beginning of her psychological instability. After her father's death she moved to Bloomsbury, where she founded the Bloomsbury Group, a group of intellectuals and artists which included E.M. Forster and Roger Fry. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, with whom she founded the Hogarth Press, a publishing house whose purpose was to publish the works of experimental writers. In 1941 she committed suicide by drowning herself in a river. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Mrs Dalloway's story takes place in just one day in one place: the city of London. A middle-aged woman, Clarissa Dalloway, is busy buying flowers and items for the party she has organized for the evening. The narrative follows her thoughts and actions and tries to capture the many impressions that the modern city of London produces in and about her. In the novel, Clarissa's counterpart is a man, Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran. For a journey towards self-destruction: the novel ends with his suicide. News of her death reaches Clarissa and she is shocked to realize that