James Joyce: Dubliners and Ulysses - Irish Novelist and Innovator of Modernist Prose, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce: Dubliners and Ulysses - Irish Novelist and Innovator of Modernist Prose e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) James Joyce is one of the most important novelists of all time, one of the greatest innovators of 20* century prose writing and one of the greatest representatives of Modernism. James Joyce was born in 1882 and was not interested in politics, that's why he left Ireland. His two best-known literary works are Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories written using a naturalistic style, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which is a sort of autobiographical Bildunsgroman (novel of formation). Joyce travelled a lot across Europe and in Trieste became friends with the Italian writer Italo Svevo, who influenced his style and themes, and shared his interest about psychoanalysis. In 1914, when the First World War broke out, Joyce moved to Switzerland and he never came back to Ireland. There, he started working on his masterpiece, Ulysses (1922). Ulysses reproduces the structure of Homer's Odyssey: the narration follows the actions of one single character, Leopold Bloom, who wanders in the city of Dublin in one single day. In this book, Joyce uses the narrative technique of the stream of consciousness, which allows him to enter Bloom’s mind and to make the reader comprehend his thoughts, perceptions and sensations. Joyce and Ireland: a complex relationship Joyce's works are all set in Ireland, which he both loved and hated. More in particular, Dublin became the mythical place he wanted to describe, by using ordinary objects that become universal and show the epiphanies of the characters. According to the author, Ireland was a country dominated by stagnation but also his main source of inspiration. Dubliners (1914) Dubliners is a collection of 15 stories which talk about 15 typical inhabitants of the city of Dublin. The story can be divided into three main groups: the first three stories relate to the theme of childhood and there is a strong sense of disillusionment and failure; the second part deals with adulthood and itis marked by man's impossibility to escape from the suffering, the passivity of the Irish and the paralysis of their will; the last part concerns the relationship between Irish individuals and collective institutions and develop the sense of paralysis. The major theme of these collection is the city of Dublin, a rather statistic town, and his inhabitants, who seem to be imprisoned in it. Dubliners wants to explore every face of society and the narrator is completely subjected by the character. The Death The story that concludes the book is The Dead, whose main protagonist is Gabriel, an individual who lives his life as a dead person. The story talks about Gabriel and Greta, a couple that, after a family party, get back in the hotel. While they were at the party, Greta heard a song that awaked a very memorable moment about an ex-lover, Micheal Furey, a man who, in order to say goodbye, he got really ill and died. Once back at the hotel, Gabriel asks her why she looks to thoughtful and Gretta tells him about Micheal Furey. Immediately after this, she falls asleep and Gabriel has his own epiphany: for the first time, Gabriel understands that he is not the only man his wife loved during her life: this is a sort of shock for him and the fragile world that he had built with Great suddenly collapses. So, this self-centered man, that thought he was the one loved by women, is jealous of someone else and cannot stand he idea that his wife sometimes might think of someone else. This is typical male while women identify themselves with the relationship because women are programmed for two since they were born: harsher conflict between identity and the duo of relationships.