James Joyce, Dubliners (+Eveline), Ulysses (+Molly's monologue), appunti maturità, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce, Dubliners (+Eveline), Ulysses (+Molly's monologue), appunti maturità e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE He’s the first of the modernist writers and novelists. He was also a teacher and a translator. He’s the first modernist writer in England, soon before Virginia Woolf. They were born and died in the same years. BIOGRAPHY Joyce was an Irishman born in a catholic family in Dublin. He was educated by Jesuits and completed his school education in Dublin, at Trinity College. When WW1 broke out, he moved to Zurich with his family, where he began writing the first chapters of Ulysses, which was first published in France because of censorship in Great Britain and in the USA. It was published legally only in 1933. He lived between France, Italy and Austria. He had to move because he was afraid of persecution. He became close friend with Italo Svevo. In Paris he began his second major work, Finnegans Wake. Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. He died disappointed with the reception of his work. WRITING Between 19th and 20th century the situation in Ireland wasn’t that good, as a matter of facts, poverty was very high. There was an attitude of stillness and constant expectation of things to change but do nothing. Joyce came to realize that people, especially in Dublin, had an instinctive stillness he could no longer tolerate. Religiously speaking, Ireland always represented Catholicism. Families were huge and lived terrible living conditions. Ireland has always been a very poor country because it didn’t have the same dignity as Britain and was considered as a secondary country. His style is impersonal: he uses different point of views and narrative techniques to not to express the author’s viewpoint, which has to be objective in order to give back a real image of life. He developed his style thanks to realism and the prose of Dubliners: he uses free indirect speech, the interior monologue with two levels of narration (to give a realistic form to the character’s thoughts), the extreme interior monologue, and the stream of consciousness. DUBLINERS First literary work Joyce published around 1914. It’s a collection of 15 short stories. The stories are chronologically ordered. The first story takes into consideration children, then adolescence, both in Dublin, then maturity and public life, with their social, political and religious features. Joyce, being a modernist, was hostile to city life and, as a matter of facts, Dublin is described as a place where true feeling and compassion for others do not exist, and where only selfishness and cruelty surface. The last of the stories, The Dead, is an epilogue with all the topics covered in the last 14 stories. The purpose was to portray through his short stories the stillness and impossibility to move. Paralysis→present in all characters, it is the acceptance of one’s condition of life, without even the desire to escape from this reality despite it is not satisfactory. Epiphany→under a biblical meaning it has the meaning of revelation, a sudden spiritual manifestation, which is what happens in the life of each character in Joyce’s stories. A subjective perception of time→ time is not perceived as objective but as subjective, leading to a psychological change. Thus, the description of Dublin is not derived from external reality, but from the characters’ floating mind. Joyce’s stories open in medias res with the analysis of a particular moment, and the portrait of the character is based on introspection rather than on description. Stream of consciousness→or “flow of thoughts”, is a characterizing technical feature of modernism in general. This expression was introduced by psychologists. Henry James was one of the psychological novelists. His brother William was a psychologist and created this expression, which refers to a free flow of thoughts coming to people’s mind. Joyce’s stream of consciousness is complicated by the fact that the thoughts in the mind of his characters don’t follow a chronological order, but they have a flashback and from it go back to the present and jump to the future directly. This continue passage makes Joyce’s prose sometimes difficult to understand. As he proceeds, his prose becomes more and more difficult to understand, sometimes almost impossible. Joyce realizes all the rules had followed so far will no longer be respected. Removes punctuation and syntactical structure. We will get to a point where words will become unrecognizable. What is left is the rhythm of narration and the possibility to feel something as readers. Characters— he portraits the lower-middle-class as afflicted people, oppressed by social affairs. They seem despaired, and even when they try to escape, they are too spiritually weak. Style— he uses meticulous descriptions, in which he mixes realism and symbolism. Religious symbolism and color symbolism have a great importance. In Dubliners he especially uses the interior monologue and the chiasmus. In the stories of childhood he uses an anonymous first-person narrator (probably a little boy), and for the other 12 stories he uses a third-person narrator, who tends to disappear in the interior monologue, where the protagonist's pure thoughts are introduced without any reporting verbs. The language of Dubliners is always adapted to the character’s according to their age, social class and role. EVELINE (FROM “DUBLINERS”)- plot Eveline is a young woman living in Dublin with her father. Her mother is dead. Dreaming of a better life beyond the shores of Ireland, Eveline plans to elope with Frank, a sailor who is her secret lover (Eveline’s father having forbade Eveline to see Frank after the two men fell out), and start a new life in Argentina. With her mother gone, Eveline is responsible for the day-to-day running of the household: her father is drunk and only reluctantly tips up his share of the weekly housekeeping money, and her brother Harry is busy working and is away a lot on business (another brother, Ernest, has died). Eveline herself keeps down a job working in a shop. On Saturday nights, when she asks her father for some money, he tends to unleash a tirade of verbal abuse, and is often drunk. When he eventually hands over his housekeeping money, Eveline has to go to the shops and buy the food for the Sunday dinner at the last minute. Eveline is tired of this life, and so she and Frank book onto a ship leaving for Argentina. But as she is just about to board the ship, Eveline suffers a failure of resolve, and cannot go through with it. She wordlessly turns round and goes home, leaving Frank to board the ship alone. EVELINE (FROM “DUBLINERS”)- analysis The main element is dust, which we usually find on old things (=the past). Another meaning of dust in Eveline’s routine→she is tired of her routine, but she can’t do anything to change it or she should manage to change something. She’s unhappy. She doesn’t get along with the shop keeper. She is reproached of no acting adequately considering her job as a shop assistant. Dust, routine, abusive father, melancholy. Eveline often remembers about her happy life. Her routine elements are tiering for Eveline, so much so that she wants to escape to Buenos Aires. Ideal of paralysis→At the opening of the passage, she is represented leaning on the curtain and inhaling the smell of dust. She can’t react to a bad smell she’s inhaling, she can’t or doesn’t want to move away. Another peculiarity was the idea of “what would people say if”. People were used to see Eveline meeting people her family knew. What would they say if suddenly she would run away with Frank? The passage started with a 19 y/o Eveline. She presents the treatment her father gave her on a weekly basis. It’s more a torture than a bad treatment. She starts having doubts about her life. Eveline is more afraid of losing her respectability if she married Frank. Marriage might be one of her goals, become a married woman deserves more respect. She felt guilty for running away. They were a happy family, when her mother and brother were alive, and her father wasn’t that abusive. Eveline is in love with the idea of being married. No one had ever appreciated her the way Frank appreciates her. Second, she had never had such a nice time with every other man of her family, neither be in one of her family’s attention. Frank took her out to see an opera at the theatre and he would sing to her. Frank represented all that she had never been and she never will. Frank was a young man who decided to have a career into the unknown, while Eveline is still leaning on the curtain. She is in love with the idea of being in love. She wants to share the same enthusiastic attitude to life Frank still has. He might not be a millionaire, but he could provide for her. We see her paralysis and she’s thinking more and more often about the awful episodes of her life. Plus, she hears the music of a street organ and the worst memory of her life comes to her mind: the day when her mother died. The sign of this organ rings her bad memories back but adds to her paralysis.