James Joyce, biografia e opere, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce, biografia e opere e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, one of the greatest fiction authors of 20th century, he was born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, on February 2, 1882. He belongs to a family of Dublin's good society, whose financial condition, however, gradually declines. His parents enroll him in a Catholic school, specifically at a Jesuit institution, Clongowes Wood College (but he will also study at Belvedere College, also owned by the Jesuits). Later, enrolled at Dublin University, he majored in modern languages. During these years he began to manifest a nonconformist and rebellious character. In addition to French, he studied Italian (to read in the original language Dante, Giordano Bruno and G. Vico, his favorite authors) and Norwegian (stimulated by his love for Ibsen). Tired of the Dublin environment he moved to Paris to pursue, without much conviction, courses in medicine. His vocation as a writer went on to reveal itself between 1900 and 1904, years in which he wrote “Epiphanies”, a collection of short lyrical prose. In 1903 he hastily returned to Dublin, where his mother was dying, and stayed there for a few months, teaching English in a high school. In 1904 he met Zora Barnacle, whom he later married and by whom he had two children; with her he traveled to Paris, Zurich and finally to Pula and Trieste, where he earned a living teaching at the Berlitz School. In Italy he befriended Italo Svevo. In 1907 he published the book of lyrics “Chamber music”, which was received with total indifference. Joyce then turned to prose and in 1912 returned to Ireland where he presented a group of short stories, "Dubliners" (People of Dublin), based on a realistic reconstruction of Dublin life, to a publishing house. The book was rejected and only in 1914, after travels due to its alleged unpatriotism, was it published in London. Joyce had meanwhile published his first novel, "A portrait of the artist as a young man" (1904), When World War I started Joyce went with his family to Zurich, where he continued to work on writing his second novel, Ulysses, which he had begun writing in 1914. Beginning in 1918, in New York's Little Review, he began publication of Ulysses. In the same year his only play, Exiles, came out. In 1919 he returned to Trieste to complete the novel, and in 1920, on the advice of E. Pound, he went to Paris, where Ulysses came out in volume (1922). Banned in England and the United States for blasphemous expressions and obscenities, it caused quite a stir and was judged by critics as a bold and ambitious literary experiment. In 1933 U.S. authorities lifted censorship on Ulysses, which came out in the American edition the following year. In 1940, at the beginning of the World War, the writer moved to Zurich, where he died during surgery. About his most famous works: - Dubliners (People of Dublin) Dubliners (Dubliners, 1914) is a collection of fifteen stories intended to portray the decadent atmosphere of the city. The author's intention is to "write a portrait of the moral history of my country, and I chose Dublin as the setting because this city seemed to me the center of paralysis." The city is presented in stories that proceed according to the four moments of childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life (political, artistic and religious). Returning to Trieste from a sojourn in Rome in 1907, Joyce added a final story, The dead, one of the finest tales of twentieth-century fiction in English: the feeling of death pervades everything and every thought, uniting the living and the dead in a hopeless fate. Also in this tale, as in the previous ones, Joyce makes use of epiphany, that is, the sudden revelation of an emblematic truth or of the inner reality of things, which may manifest itself in a fragment of dialogue, in the description of a common object or in an unusual situation. In this sense all short stories are Dublin epiphanies. Paralysis, on the other hand, is the typical condition of modern man in the metropolis, of his inability to find a way out of physical, moral, action, political and religious infirmity. The characters in the stories are never judged from above, but simply observed in their everyday life, and the stories appear to be told from the point of view of one of them. In class we have seen Evelin's short story, Joyce describes the life of a 19-year-old girl who has the opportunity to escape and change her routine but is unable to leave her family and community in Dublin. - Ulysses (1922) A fundamental book of twentieth-century literature, released in the same year as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ulysses (Ulysses, 1922) definitively closes the great Romantic season and its last outcomes, Symbolism and Decadentism. Eliot called it an "anti-romance" to emphasize its absolute compositional novelty. The book recounts a day in the life of Irish Jew Leopold Bloom, punctuated by episodes that repeat the pattern of the Odyssey. In fact, the structure of the parts and chapters also follows the Homeric tale, with strong symbolism. Joyce's Ulysses is perhaps the Irish author's best known and most important work. Drafted by the stream-of-consciousness technique, it follows in the narrative the progress of the protagonist's thoughts, with a certain musicality. The work also divided critics: there are those who considered it a milestone of twentieth-century literature, such as Ezra Pound, and those who harshly criticized it, such as Virginia Woolf. There's a lot of obscenity in Joyce's language, which caused the novel bannation from many countries on charges of immorality.