JAMES JOYCE - EVELINE, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica JAMES JOYCE - EVELINE e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE (1882 - 1941) He is a modernist writer. He was born in Dublin in 1882 and attended a Jesuit school. When he was very little his father lost his job and that lead Joyce and his family to have many economic problems. He attended University college in Dublin where he started to study English, Italian and French. Joyce was sympathetic towards nationalist movements but found their aim too narrow minded. He believed in freedom therefore, at the age of 22, he decided to leave Ireland because he did not feel accepted by literary circles. He saw his exile as a way of freeing himself from Dublin, a place of paralysis and repression. On the 16°" of June 1906 he first walked out with his wife, the date became also famous as the single-day setting of his novel “Ulysses”. The couple later on moved abroad, Joyce started to teach English in Pola and then in Trieste. In 1909, while in Trieste, he became the English teacher of the Italian writer Ettore Schmitz also known as Italo Svevo, the two of them shared the same view of life and started a friendship which would last many years. Joyce will also promote Svevo’s novel “La Coscienza di Zeno” in order to increase its popularity. In 1914 Joyce published the novel “Dubliners” in book form and later on he started to write “Ulysses”, published in instalments in the 19205, after the war. The novel became very popular in America even if it was censored because it was accused of obscenity. When the war broke out in 1915 Joyce had to move to Zurich and then to Paris. He died in 1941 in Zurich after he gradually started to became blind. DUBLINERS Dubliners is a novel written by James Joyce in 1914, at the eve of world war I, during the period in which Joyce was living in Trieste. It consists in a collection of 15 short stories expressing human situations and leading to a moral, social and spiritual revelation. 14 short stories are divided in four groups according to the ages of man: Childhood, Adolescence, Mature Life and Public Life. The last one, The Dead, summaries themes and motifs of all the other stories, and it is a sort of epilogue. Joyce's intentions was to write a chapter of the moral history of Ireland, choosing Dublin for the scene as the center of paralysis. However the novel was written while he was in exile in fact for Joyce the only possibility to talk about Dublin as a morally paralyzed city was from the outside. Indeed, while most Victorian writers had celebrated the development in civilization, Joyce was hostile to city life, finding it degrading. In fact, Dublin is a place of cruelty and selfishness, where true feelings and ‘compassion do not exist Joyce presents Dublin in a negative prospective. He wants to address the fact that Dubliners are not aware of their own state of paralysis, indeed when the epiphany happens they understand they are not able to change anymore. EVELINE it is one of the 15 short stories collected in the novel “Dubliners”. It is contained in the section called “Adolescence”. The main protagonist of the story is Eveline, a young 19 years old girl from Dublin. The narrator is Eveline's inner mind. Indeed in the novel there is a strong use of the interior monologue through which Joyce describes Eveline's story thought her thoughts and point of view, coming to know more and more information about her past. Indeed all the narration takes place inside her mind in which past and present are mixed. Joyce portray the typical time of the mind buy creating continuous shift between present, past and future therefore chronological time is not indicated. Time, space, events and actions are irrelevant. There is an external third person narrator however it tends to disappear because it has no role and importance. The last part of the story takes place outside her home and it will leave her shocked and paralyzed. The setting (her house) is simple but also highly symbolical. The inside is the present, the outside represent the past and future. THE REBELLION AGAINST THE CHURCH Joyce attended a Jesuit's school. Jesuits are a group of high church man, the educated branch of the church, their aim is to spread the catholic culture around the world. In Ireland they founded a very rigid educational system, they were very strict and close-minded. Joyce challenged Catholicism, his hostility towards the Church can be associated to the revolt of the artist against the religious doctrine. He wants to portray the struggle between the atheist artist and the church, which is responsible for the paralysis of the individual and enclosed the individual in a sort of a moral cage. DUBLIN Joyce set all his works in Ireland and mostly in the city of Dublin. His aim was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people, doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. By portraying these ordinary Dubliners, he succeeded in representing the emotional, mental and biological reality of man, fusing it with the cultural heritage of modern civilization and the reality of the natural world around him. CHARACTERS Dubliners are described as afflicted people. Everyone seems to be caught up in an endless web of despair, Joyce's Dubliners are unable to escape because they are spiritually weak. Eveline is the perfect example of this moral weakness, or paralysis, which is afflicting people, who are closed in a sort of prison, given by mentality, prejudices, religion. STYLE Joyce, influenced by the French Symbolists, believed in the Impersonality of the Artist . The artist's task was to render life objectively in order to present a true image of it. Joyce uses different points of view and narrative techniques appropriate to the characters portrayed. In Dubliners his prose and language is realistic and disciplined. He explores characters' impressions and points of view through the use of Free Direct Speech and the Interior Monologue. In Ulysses he uses extreme interior monologue and language breaks down into a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical connections. In his novels facts acts are confused, explored from different points of view and presented as “clues”. Geographical personal and social details are widespread in Dubliners and in Ulysses. Joyce transcends realism by collecting and analyzing the impressions and thoughts that an outer event has given to the mind of the character. Joyce's stories and novels often open in medias res with the analysis of a particular moment, and that the portrait of the character is based on introspection rather than on description. Time is not perceived as objective but as subjective, leading to psychological change. Therefore the accurate description of Dublin is not derived from external reality, but from the character's flowing mind. PARALYSIS Paralysis is the main theme in Dubliners: it is present from beginning to end and becomes gradually more powerful and universal. The paralysis which Joyce wants to portray is both physical, resulting from external forces, and moral, linked to religion, politics and culture. However, Joyce's Dubliners accept this condition either because they are not even aware of it or because they are not able to escape. The moral center of Dubliners is also the revelation of paralysis to its victims (The Epiphany). Coming to awareness or self-realization marks the climax of the stories. The ultimate theme is therefore the inability and failure in understanding and finding a way out of paralysis.