James Joyce: Life and Major Works - Dubliners and Ulysses, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce: Life and Major Works - Dubliners and Ulysses e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE Life James Joyce was born in Dublin and received a humanistic education from the Jesuits. 1904 represents a turning point for Joyce, both on a personal and professional level; on June 16, 1904 (the day in which the story of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses will take place) Joyce meets Nora Barnacle who becomes his life partner and from whom he will have two children and leaves Ireland to settle in Europe. He stays in Paris, Zurich and Trieste where he lives as a teacher and eventually dies in Zurich. Dubliners Joyce's first great portrait of Dublin life came with Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories. It is a representation of the stagnation and paralysis of the Irish middle class life in and around Dublin, presented in four stages: childhood, adolescence, maturity, public life and an epilogue (the dead). All Dubliners are spiritually weak people, they are slaves of their familiar, moral, cultural, religious and political life. The hearth of the whole collection is the revelation of the paralysis to its victims, and the failure to find a way out of it. The description in each story is realistic and extremely concise. The use of realism is mixed with symbolism. since external details generally have a deeper meaning. The peculiar technique used is the epiphany, coined by Joyce himself: it is a sudden revelation of a strong reality caused by a trivial gesture. The narrator tends to disappear in the inner monologue, which is presented in the form of direct and free speech: the pure thoughts of the protagonist presented without interference. Ulysses The whole novel takes place in a single day and during this day, three main characters perform daily actions. The central character is Leopold Bloom, a common. man who during his wanderings meets Stephen Dedalus, who becomes his adopted son. Finally, there is Bloom's wife, Molly, who is planning an afternoon of adultery. Ulysses is linked to the Odyssey, to the story of Ulysses and to his travels. Joyce used the Odyssey as a structural framework for his book, organizing his characters and events around Homer's heroic model, with Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen as his son Telemachus and Molly as Penelope. Ulysses is divided into three parts and eighteen episodes. The characters represent two aspects of human nature: Stephen is pure intellect and embodies every young man in search of maturity, in his stream of consciousness he associates things by similarity. Mrs. Bloom represents carnality; her train of thought is carried on by her memories. Mr Bloom is the whole of humanity, in his stream of consciousness things are connected by cause and effect or by proximity in space and time. The novel's theme is moral: human life means falling but also struggling to get up and seek the good. What really distinguishes the Ulysses is his revolutionary prose. In this work Joyce brought the interior monologue to perfection by employing two levels of narration, one external to the character's mind and the other internal.