Scarica James Joyce - life, "Dubliners", "Ulysses" e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce (1882 - 1941) Life: He was born in Dublin (Ireland) into a middle-class Catholic (Ireland was mainly Catholic) family. He attended two Jesuit schools (inside the Church they were the acculturated ones). He denounced their strictness in education, but as an adult he realized he became an organized and disciplined man thanks to his education. Finding life in Ireland an obstacle to his own artistic development, in 1902 he committed himself to a life of self-imposed exile (he felt that Irish culture was limiting). First he went to Paris with his family, where he met and married a girl called Nora. She was an uneducated woman (perfect wife, because he taught her everything). He dated her for the first time on the 16th of June 1904, a day that a character of his work Ulysses calls Bloomsday. He then went to Trieste, where he met Italo Svevo. They became friends and influenced each other, especially regarding the stream of consciousness technique. In Trieste he finished his first two important works: Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), the first novel of the Trilogy of his second phase, whose protagonist is Steven Dedalus (the second is Ulysses and the third is Finnegans Wake, in which he applies the stream of consciousness technique to a sleeping mind, so even more difficult to understand). At the outbreak of WWI he left Trieste (that was occupied by the Austrians, enemies of England) for Zurich (neutral), where he started to work on Ulysses (a quest, an interior journey), published in Paris in 1922. In Paris he kept writing Finnegans Wake, his last novel published in 1939. He died in Zurich in 1941. His production can be divided in 2 phases, which share the same topic: Ireland and the Irish people. The 1° is characterized by a traditional style and logical sequence of events (Dubliners), while the 2° is strongly influenced by the stream of consciousness technique. It was a technique he used to turn into writing his ideas, lacking punctuation and logic. It was difficult to read and only a few critics could understand it (helped by Joyce himself). He was considered by the other authors as the only one able to use this technique, and because of this positive consideration they helped him economically. Dubliners (1914): It’s a collection of 15 short stories (each one has a protagonist), in each of which the failure of self-realization of an inhabitant of Dublin is examined in biographical and psychological detail. The first 14 stories had all been written in 1905, when the book was originally refused by publishers because of its roughness and strictness. It was considered immoral for its pitiless portrait of Irish city life and also objected to the mention of real places and people in it. The last and longest story was finished in 1907, but the collection was published only in 1914. It’s Joyce’s first portrait of Dublin life, being the centre of paralysis (not a dynamic city). This paralysis is the paralysis of will, courage and self-knowledge that leads ordinary men and women to accept the limitations imposed by the social context they live in. The paralysis is presented in four stages: childhood (children), youth (teenages), maturity (adults) and public life (politicians and people with a social role). Everything in this collection is described with realism and symbolism. Peculiar of this work is the use of epiphanies, which mean ‘manifestations, showings’ as in the showing of the Christ child to the Magi, to indicate that moment when a simple object or fact, an ordinary situation, suddenly explodes with meaning and makes a person realise his/her condition. Eveline: It’s part of the stories dealing with youth (it’s not synonymous with vitality and enthusiasm). The story has a typical beginning, with a young woman looking out of her window while the day ends. She was tired, not physically, but mentally, of her life without any entertainment. Before her mother died she promised her to stay in their house and to take care of her brothers. Like the other stories of the section youth it develops around a love story: Eveline has agreed to run away from an oppressive and violent father and a miserable home to follow Frank, a sailor, to Buenos Aires. In the end, she does not have the courage (she religiously asks help even to God) to go aboard the ship that would take her and Frank to Buenos Aires. She just stands on the quay, unable to move, as if paralyzed. She is helpless, detached, frustrated (all Irish people are compelled not to decide).
