James Joyce - Dubliners e Ulysses, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce - Dubliners e Ulysses e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE  He was born in 1882, in Dublin, the eldest surviving child of ten children.  He was largely educated by the Jesuits, before he studied Modern Languages at University College, Dublin.  Grew up as a rebel among rebels. In particular, he contrasted Yeats and the other literary contemporaries who tried to rediscover the Irish Celtic identity.  His interest was for a broader European culture, and this led him to begin to think of himself as a European rather than an Irishman.  In 1902, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on modern languages.  The following year he left Ireland to attend a medical school in Paris, but his mother’s fatal illness brought him back to Dublin.  In June 1904 he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, a twenty-year-old girl who was working as a chambermaid in a hotel.  Then, he settled in Trieste with his future wife. Here, he started teaching English and made friends with Italo Svevo.  In the period spent in Trieste, his work Dubliners came out, a collection of 15 short stories on Dublin and its life.  In 1915, Joyce moved to Zurich together with his family, due to the Austrian occupation in Trieste.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his semi-autobiographical novel, was published.  In 1920 he moved to Paris and two years later published Ulysses, his masterpiece.  Another of his relevant work was released in 1939, under the title of Finnegans Wake.  Shortly afterwards, the Joyce family returned to Zurich, where he died at the age of 59. DUBLINERS Dubliners includes 15 short stories which are grouped in 4 sections, related to the stages of human life. They all lack action since the author aims at representing the mental process of the character. Joyce, being a Modernist novelist, was hostile to city life, perceiving Ireland as a narrow- minded country. Dublin is a place where true feelings and compassion for others do not exist, where cruelty and selfishness rule. For this reason, Dublin symbolises the centre of paralysis and its inhabitants are paralysed in their life by the old-fashion moral conventions. They accept their condition because they are not aware of it. The climax of the stories occurs when the characters come to awareness of their own paralysis. Joyce employed a peculiar technique called epiphany that is a sudden moment of deep insight triggered by a trivial gesture, an ordinary object or a banal situation, which is emotionally significant only to the character and reveals their inner truth, the paralysis. It basically consists of a memory, previously removed by the character, which turns up through a sort of free association of ideas. However, this intense revelation is a negative revelation since the alternative to paralysis is the escape, driven by a sense of enclosure, but it always leads to failure, due to their moral weakness. The last story, entitled The Dead, was added later, and is considered Joyce’s first masterpiece because it summarises themes and motifs of the other 14 stories of the collection and it functions as an epilogue. Joyce mainly focuses on the lower middle-class Dubliners, those who struggle for survival. In particular, he analyses the effects that religious, political, social, and economic forces exert on the workers. This overwhelming background catches Dubliners up in an endless web of despair. The description in each story is detailed and realistic. Realism is mixed with symbolism since external details generally have a deeper meaning. That’s why the narrator mediates between the reader and the character’s mind. The style in Dubliners is characterised only by two elements: the interior monologue and chiasmus, that is, patterned repetition of images which can create melodic effects. In the first 3 short stories, which make up the childhood section, Joyce adopts a first-person narrator, who remains nameless and not identified. It may be the same little boy for each of them but there is no certainty. The narrator describes the event from the young boy’s point of view, so, the reader can seep into the character’s mind. For the other 12 stories, he employed a third person narrator that shares a specific character’s prospective. The narrator tends to disappear in the interior monologue, which is in the form of free direct speech. The language suits the age, the social class and the role of the characters and is simple, objective, and neutral. Eveline This short story belongs to the adolescence section and describes the life of a 19-years-old girl, who has the opportunity to change her routine life but is unable to leave her familiar community in Dublin.  There is no chronological order, but the timeline is totally disrupted.  The style is realistic and objective: the third-person narrator acts as a mediator between the outside world and the inner world of the character but disappears behind the scenes, when there is an interior monologue.  It’s a new kind of realism since external details generally have a symbolic meaning, which play a crucial role in the technique of epiphany. Eveline Hill sits at a window in her home and looks out onto the street while fondly recalling her childhood. “One time” marks the beginning of a flashback, in which she played with other children in a field, which now is covered with new homes. She realises that these were good times since her mother was still alive and her father was not so bad then. Mixing flashbacks with current reflection, she makes an implicit contrast with the present, which implies that now, probably, they are not happy as in the past.  Molly, who is planning to cheat on his husband, is totally in contrast with the faithful Penelope, who waits for the return of her husband. Ulysses is divided into three parts: Telemachiad, Odyssey, Nostos, embodying the three main characters. Joyce planned each movement of each character on street of Dublin he knew best, as he was playing chess. In so doing, he managed to convey the Dubliner atmosphere to the reader. Consequently, Dublin becomes itself a character in this novel. Ulysses is famous for many things, from its complex structure to its difficulty, from its brilliantly realised characters to its obscenities; but what really stands out is its revolutionary prose. In fact, Joyce combined several methods to make his characters’ inner life creating the so-called collage technique, quite similar to the techniques used by the cubist artists who depicted a scene from all perspectives. He employed the interior monologue; the cinematic technique, with the literary equivalents of close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots, suspension of speech; question and answer; dramatic dialogue and the random juxtaposition of events. Joyce brought to perfection the interior monologue employing two levels of narration:  the one in which external narration interacts with the other internal to the character’s mind;  and the one with only the mind level of narration with character’s thoughts which flow freely, without external interfering, even the narrator disappears. The language is rich in puns, images, contrasts, paradoxes, juxtapositions, interruptions, false clues, and symbols; the range of vocabulary and registers is amazing, moreover in almost every episode slang, catchphrases, nicknames, even expressions taken from advertising are present and used to voice the unspoken activity of the mind. Foreign words, literary quotations and allusions to other texts are other important linguistic features. I said yes I will Joyce employees the most extreme version of the interior monologue performed by Molly Bloom. The third-person narrator is completely absent, there is no punctuation, no introduction, no grammar and spelling coherence, and capital letters aren’t preceded by a full stop. There is an apparent chaos, but it is actually the product of an extreme hard work. The author tries to represent the stream of consciousness on the pre-speech level: the first-person narrator speaks from the point of view of Molly, so the reader will feel completely inside Molly’s mind, without external intruding. Moreover, the writer adopts the language of sensory impression to allow the reader to see, feel, smell and touch all that Molly does. After the adultery, Molly lies in her bed and a series of thoughts crosses her mind. She juxtaposes a series of memories who are linked by association, without logical connection. She starts describing her stay in several city of the southern Spain, where she first met her husband, through tracking shots. Then, she reminds of Gibraltar, where her husband proposed. “I will” was her response to the proposal. “Yes” and “O” function as a leitmotif throughout the whole monologue:  “Yes” is a sort of confirmation, which, toward the end, intensifies the rhythm and suggests that Molly is a passionate woman. Some experts have even interpreted it as a reference to the sexual intercourse. However, the statement “as well him as another” makes her appear as a little bit detached, even though in the way she thinks, she looks enthusiastic.  “O” is misspelt since it lacks a “h”. The circle recalls the woman body, and so Molly's sensuality, and fertility, in contrast to the Bloom family, that had no child.