Scarica James Joyce: Dubliners and Ulysses e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce BIOGRAPHY Was born in Dublin in 1882 and belonged to the Catholic middle class. In 1898 started studying Italian, French and English at University College in Dublin and started writing articles. He was given a teaching position in Trieste and when he moved there, started working on Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a young man. In Trieste became friends with Italo Svevo, which influenced him. When the war broke out, he moved to Zurich and started working on Ulysses. In 1920 he moved to Paris, but when Germany occupied France, went back to Zurich, where he died in 1941. RELATIONSHIP WITH DUBLIN Joyce’s self-imposed exile gave him the opportunity to represent Ireland and Dublin with a certain objective distance. In fact, all his works are set in Ireland, which he considered a country dominated by stagnation and stasis, but at the same time was his source of inspiration. DUBLINERS STRUCTURE Is a collection of 15 short stories written in 1900 and published in 1914. The stories speak about the lives of 15 typical inhabitants of the city of Dublin and is an ideal portrait of the Irish capital. The stories can be divided into three main groups: 1) The first is characterised by the phase of childhood and has a sense of disillusionment and failure 2) Next there is the phase of adulthood which presents man’s impossibility to escape from suffering, the passivity of Irish people and the paralysis of their will 3) Last theme is the relationship between Irish individuals and collective institutions as politics, musical world and church THEME The main theme is the city of Dublin, which is represented like a static and provincial town that doesn’t have the Cosmopolitan atmosphere of other capitals and this affects the lives of its inhabitants that seems to be imprisoned in a city that doesn’t give them the chance to grow PARALYSIS The characters are united by the way common nature of failure, because the all have a desire and try to fulfil their lives by overcoming all the obstacles to this ambition but they give up because they don’t have the will to transform their desire into action. The condition of inaction is defined as paralysis, that it’s not just a physical condition, but is a spiritual stagnation of the self and the spiritual and physical death. The feeling of paralysis is due to the fact that they are tied to antiquated and limited cultural and social traditions. EPIPHANY There is one potential way to escape from the universal paralysis: the epiphany, that means revelation and manifestation. The author refers to the moment in which the characters experience the sudden revelation of the condition of paralysis but it just makes them more aware of it. NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE Stories narrated form the point of view of one character
