James Joyce Life, works, style, technique, dubliners, eveline, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce Life, works, style, technique, dubliners, eveline e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce (1882-1941) 1. Life • A rebel among rebels. • Contrast with Yeats and the other literary contemporaries who tried to rediscover the Irish Celtic identity. • He had two children, Giorgio and Lucia, with his long-time partner, Nora Barnacle, whom he eventually married. • He left Dublin at the age of twenty-two and he settled for some time in Paris, then in Rome and later in Trieste, where he made friends with Italo Svevo, and finally in Zurich. 2. The most important features of Joyce’s works • The setting of most of his works is Ireland, especially Dublin. • He rebelled against the Catholic Church. • All the facts in his narratives are explored from different points of view simultaneously. Greater importance given to the inner world of the characters. Time is perceived as subjective. His task is to render life objectively. Thanks to the isolation and detachment of the artist from society. 1 3. The evolution of Joyce’s style Dubliners (1914): • Realism • Disciplined prose • Different points of view • Free-direct speech A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): • Third-person narration • Minimal dialogue • Language and prose used to portray the protagonist’s state of mind • Free-direct speech Ulysses (1922): • Interior monologue with two levels of narration • Extreme interior monologue 4. Dublin • The Dublin represented by Joyce is not fixed and static, it is «the revolutionary montage of “Dublins” through a range of historical juxtapositions and varied styles». • The 15 stories of the Dubliners, though set in the same city, are not united by their geography: each story has a singular location. • The evocation of his town in A Portrait is deeply influenced by Joyce’s prolonged temporal and spatial distance; Dublin is filtered through Stephen’s mind. • In Ulysses, Dublin overwhelms the reader. 2 10. Dubliners: Eveline CHARACTERS • Eveline is passive, influenced by her family’s mentality • Her father is a violent and strict man, who represents her fear • Her mother is conservative and represents her duty • Frank is Eveline’s fiancé, a very kind, open-hearted and brave boy represents her unknown future • Antithesis between Eveline’s house and her new one in Buenos Aires-> Paralysis/Escape STRUCTURE AND STYLE • The story opens in medias res ->“She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue” • Third-person narrator but Eveline’s point of view. • Subjective perception of time. • Epiphany is a street organ which reminds Eveline of the promise she made to her dying mother. • Symbolic words: dust = decay, paralysis sea = action, escape Themes: • struggle between one’s happiness and one’s responsibility 5 • dream vs reality • action and inactivity • paralysis and the failure to find a way out of it. Eveline p. 253 This short story describes the life of a 19-year-old girl who has the opportunity to change her routine life but is unable to leave her familiar community in Dublin. It is evening and the action takes place in Eveline’s living room. She is sitting at the window, then she stands up. The room is dark and dusty. Eveline feels tired. What the world outside Eveline’s window makes her think about; It makes her think about her childhood. She remembers the field in which she played with the children of the avenue until a man from Belfast bought it and built houses in it. Eveline’s father in the past; Eveline and the other children of the avenue used to play with Eveline’s father, who used to interfere with and spoil their play. What objects the girl notices in her room and what features these things share; She notices the yellowing photograph of a priest - a school friend of her father’s - and the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque next to the photograph. These objects share their being old and dusty. 6 How Eveline considers her job; She considers her job as a department store clerk dull, and her superior abusive. ‘She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.’ What she has agreed to become and why; She has agreed to leave her home and her country, to move to Buenos Aires and become Frank’s wife. ‘People would treat her with respect then.’ Who Frank is and what his job is; He is Eveline’s boyfriend and he works as a sailor. What the girl remembers about him; She remembers Frank’s behavior, he is kind, open-hearted and lively. He has a house in Buenos Aires. He was awfully fond of music and sang a little. He used to call her Poppens. Whether Eveline’s father accepted the young man; Eveline’s father quarrelled with him since he distrusted sailors. After that fight, Eveline and Frank had to meet secretly. What the sound of the organ reminds her of; It reminds her of the promise she made to her dying mother during her last night and how her father had paid a street organ player to move off, cursing all foreigners. How she sees her mother’s life and what her last words really meant for Eveline; She sees her mother’s life as a ‘life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness’. Her mother’s last words, seemingly Gaelic, were ‘Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!’ (Joyce passes over in silence the improbability that a Dublin woman of this time and class would know Gaelic). 7