JAMES JOYCE, DUBLINERS AND ULYSSES, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica JAMES JOYCE, DUBLINERS AND ULYSSES e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, studied in Jesuit schools and later enrolled at University College, where he studied the modern language and became interested in European culture, so much so that he defined himself as an European rather than an Irish citizen. Joyce believed that the only way to exalt Ireland was not to create a national consciousness by referencing past history, but to recreate a realistic portrait of it from an European and cosmopolitan perspective. For this reason, Joyce moved to Paris, and then returned to Dublin to be by the side of his ailing mother. In this period he published his first short story, The Sisters, later placed at the opening of his Dubliners collection. In 1904 he met the waitress Nora Barnacle, with whom he went out for the first time on June 16, the day that later became Ulysses' Bloomsday. In 1905 the two settled in Trieste, where Joyce began teaching English and made friends with Italo Svevo. However, his literary career was hampered by numerous clashes with publishers and printers due to alleged obscene elements in his prose. In 1915, as a British citizen living in a city occupied by the Austrians, Joyce moved to Zurich. In 1917 he received the first of several anonymous donations that allowed him to continue writing the novel Ulysses, which began appearing in installments in The Little Review in 1918, but was suspended in 1920 on charges of obscenities. In 1920 Joyce moved to Paris, where he managed to publish Ulysses, which attracted both praise and harsh criticism. The next decade was very painful for Joyce, but he continued to write and in 1939 he published Finnegans Wake, which was an immediate success. In 1940, when France was occupied by the Germans, Jocye and his family returned to Zurich, where they had taken refuge during the First World War. Following a bowel operation, he died at the age of 59. Although Joyce went into voluntary exile at the age of 22, he sets all of his works in Dublin to provide a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people carrying out ordinary activities and to represent the entire mental, emotional and biological reality of man. An evident element in his works is the hostility towards the Church, which symbolizes the artist's revolt against the official doctrine of a provincial Church which influenced and controlled the minds of the Irish and which is compared to a child's conflict with his parents in the search for his artistic potential. Joyce believed in the impersonality of the artist, whose task was to render life objectively in order to give readers a faithful image of it. To do this, he must isolate himself and detach himself from society and must be independent from the patrioct pressure of the time and from the excessive power of the Catholic Church. The style and language are characterized by realism and a disciplined prose, by the exploration of the impressions and points of view of the characters, the use of free direct speech and the inner monologue, the succession of words without punctuation or grammatical links and endless puns. Joyce is a modernist, so his facts are told in a confused way, they are analyzed from multiple points of view and presented indirectly, not by an omniscient narrator. Joyce transcends photographic realism, as he collects and analyzes the impressions and thoughts that an external event has provoked in the character's inner world. Therefore, Joyce's works open in medias res with the analysis of a particular moment. Furthermore, time is not perceived as objective but as subjective. DUBLINERS Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories, which lead to a moral, social or spiritual revelation. It was published in 1914 in a newspaper with the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus. The first stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin, the others deal with the characters' middle years and their social, political or religious events. The stories are organized into four groups, each of which represents 2one stage of life: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The latest story, The Dead, was a late addition and can be considered Joyce's first masterpiece, although it serves as an epilogue. All the stories are set in Dublin, what seemed to Joyce the centre of paralysis, but, even if set in the same city, each story has a singular location. The Dublin described by Joyce is a place where true feeling and compassion for others do not exist and where cruelty and selfishness reign: it doesn't have the cosmopolitan atmosphere of many other European capitals of that time and doesn't give its inhabitants the chance to grow and develop their potential as human beings. Every Dubliner is, in fact, characterized by a sense of paralysis and described as an afflicted and spiritually weak person, as even when he wishes to escape he is unable to do it. The descriptions are realistic and concise, with an abundance of external details that generally have a deeper meaning: in fact, the use of realism is mixed with symbolism, that is also linked to religion and color, in particular to the use of brown, gray and yellow, that creates an atmosphere of despair and paralysis. Joyce attributed to symbolism the task of taking the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through the analysis of the particular. Furthermore, each story opens in medias res and is told from the point of view of one of the characters. Epiphany is a technique adopted by Joyce and corresponds to a spiritual manifestation that reveals the inner truths of the character and allows the reader to focus on the true meaning of the narrative. Epiphany, therefore, is the moment in which a painful self-realization takes place, with consequent sudden awakening triggered by banal and apparently insignificant experiences. This revelation, however, does not bring a real change. The name derives from the manifestation of the Christ Child to the Magi. The style is characterized by the use of the inner monologue and the chiasmus, that is the repetition of images. In the first three stories, Joyce uses an anonymous first- person narrator, who describes the events from his point of view and brings the readers into his mind, allowing them to know and understand him better. In the other stories the narrator is in the third person and often presents the perspective of a character, through his way of speaking, which reflects his age, his origin and his social role.