Scarica James Joyce: The Innovative Irish Novelist and His Works e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE The Irish novelist, Joyce, is one of the most significant innovators of the modern novel, there is a pre-Joyce and a post-Joyce, in literary terms. He is no longer interested in the narration of external reality, because he is influenced by Freud's theories on psychoanalysis and decides to focus on the inner world; the subject and the ideas of that subject become dominant in Joyce's literature. Joyce's works analyze an extremely fragmented individual, analyze the disintegration of the ego and the identity of the human being (Pirandello- Uno, nessuno, centomila), through the great technique of the "stream of consciousness" and Joyce is unequalled and invaluable in this technique: that is, the words flow as if they were the thoughts of a moment. He wrote two main works: “Dubliners”, a collection of short stories, and “Ulysses”. Dubliners includes 15 short stories in which he talks about his Ireland and chooses Dublin as background of these stories because it is the center of the paralysis. The paralysis of this declining society also involves all its characters, as they are marked by a lack of growth, they live passively in immobility, in stasis, in the inability to take command of their own existence. Then, through an action, an insignificant gesture, a thought, a insignificant situation, they become aware of their condition. This is epiphany, that is, appearance, revelation, disillusionment. This dynamic is clear in "The dead", the story of a couple, Greta and Gabriel, who go to a Christmas party. Greta remembers her beautiful old love, Michael Furey, who actually died for her. In that moment, Gabriel realizes that he is spiritually dead because he had nothing to die for and nothing to really live for (epiphany). In the chapter “She was fast asleep” he begins to wonder who was dead more: Michael, who was really dead but who remained alive in feeling, or him, who was physically alive but spiritually dead. The text says: “It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife”. “His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling”. At the end, he looks out the window and sees the snow falling on Dublin, especially “It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried”. “The snow was falling upon all the living and the dead”, therefore it was impossible to distinguish the kingdom of the living and the kingdom of the dead. (The author uses free indirect speech. Adopt an external narrator and an impersonal style, because he does not want to make moral judgments, simply convey the habits, behaviors, and thoughts of the Dubliners, so that the reader can form his own opinion). (Gabriel è un po’ come l’uomo etico di Kierkegaard, lui ha scelto, lui ha una moglie, ha una carriera, ma proprio come ci insegna Kierkegaard proprio per questa ragione, ha silenziato tutte le altre possibili vite che avrebbe potuto seguire. L’uomo che sceglie di scegliere, ma proprio perché sceglie si preclude ogni altra possibilità. Ovviamente è un passo in avanti rispetto allo stadio inferiore, quello estetico, di casanova, di Dorian Grey, l’uomo che sceglie di non scegliere e cadono nella noia. Da non confondere con la “ripresa” quello è quello che l’uomo dovrebbe fare, una volta che ha capito la sua vocazione, allora è come se lui cercasse ancora quell’esperienza che già ha fatto, come una persona che ama quello che fa quindi ogni volta trova qualcosa di nuovo e ne vuole ancora, non è mai stanco perché ama quello che fa. come si dice in psicoanalisi, la vita che lui vive è un po’ il sogno di un altro, non è appagante per lui, non ama ciò che fa, è vittima della sua vita ed è caduto nella disperazione dell’uomo etico. Qui Kierkegaard direbbe, certo perché devi avere il coraggio di fare l’ulteriore salto, di andare verso l’ultimo stadio, quello religioso). (alcuni temi possiamo ritrovarli negli autori italiani, come in Svevo e la sua figura dell’inetto. Ma dobbiamo considerare che qui Joyce dipinge un’atmosfera che caratterizza un’intera città e per estensione quasi l’intero Paese e non, come Svevo, la caratteristica di un singolo uomo, nel quale comunque noi possiamo ritrovarci). About Joyce's masterpiece, "Ulysses", critics say : "after Ulysses no other novel should have been published because everything has already been accomplished with this text". It is considered one of the most complex masterpieces because behind it there is a genius, Joyce's genius. Joyce is the inventor of the anti-hero. His work Ulysses is based on this, because clearly this title is a reference to Homer's Ulysses, therefore Joyce's Ulysses is a modern reinterpretation of Homer's Ulysses and is the antithesis of Homer's Ulysses because it does not speak of glory and heroism, but completely the opposite. The story develops in June 16, 1904 and the protagonists are Stephen Dedalus
