JAMES JOYCE - MODERN POET, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica JAMES JOYCE - MODERN POET e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE He was born in Dublin in 1882 into a middle-class family that gradually became poor during James's childhood. He was educated at Jesuit schools and at University College of Dublin. Here he studied French, Italian, English and German languages and literatures, and graduated in modern languages. He grew up a rebel among rebels; in fact he wasn’t attracted by the movements that wanted a free Ireland from English dominance, but he was interested in European culture, so he considered himself a European. He spent some time travelling trough Europe, but his mother’s fatal sickness in 1903 brought him back to Dublin. In 1904 Joyce moved away from here with Nora Barnacle declaring that he had chosen voluntary exile. In October they moved to Italy, settling in Trieste where Joyce began teaching English. These years were difficult because of disappointment and financial problems. Joyce was early in trouble because of obscene elements in his prose. In 1915 Joyce moved to Zurich together with his family, since his position as a British national in Austrian-occupied Trieste left him no alternative. His works established him as a writer, but he had still financial difficulties. In 1917 he received the first anonymous donations which enabled him to continue writing Ulysses, which was published in Paris in 1922, that lead to a protest and to a process to establish if it was pornographic. When Hitler advanced in Europe, Joyce moved to neutral Switzerland where died in 1941. POETICS Joyce was a Modernist writer. He set all his works in Ireland and in the city of Dublin. He gives a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people (Dubliners) doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. Joyce was educated by the Jesuits and Catholic priests, but he challenged Catholicism, which had taken possession of Irish minds. But it was also a conflict with his parents linked to the quest for his artistic potentialities. He was almost blind. This physical problem was compensated by his sense of ear, and the sound of words was very important to him. His themes become gradually less relevant than the ‘narrative’ itself. The facts become confused, are explored from different points of view, are presented as ‘clues’. Joyce collects and analyses the impressions and thoughts that an outer event, at a given moment, has caused in the inner world of the character. His stories open in medias res with the analysis of a particular moment. The portrait of the character is based on introspection and no on description. Time isn’t objective but subjective, leading to psychological change. The accurate description of Dublin isn’t derived from external reality, but from the characters’ minds floating. Joyce, influenced by the French authors Flaubert and Baudelaire, believed in the impersonality of the artist. His task was to make life objectively and give to the readers a true image of it. This led to the isolation of the artist from society. There isn’t an omniscient narrator, but Joyce used different impressions and points of view. His style, technique and language developed from the realism and the disciplined prose of the Dubliners. He uses of the free direct speech, the epiphany and the interior monologue. Language is a succession of words without punctuation or grammar connections, infinite puns. WORKS CHAMBER MUSIC - (1907) The first of his works to appear in book form was 36 short poems. DUBLINERS - (1914) It is a collection of 15 stories narrating the decay of Dublin, a city where immobility is the leading attitude towards life and its experiences. The origin of the collection were the oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural and economic forces on the lives of lower-middle-class Dubliners, considered as afflicted people. The stories deal with childhood, adolescence, maturity and public, political and religious life in Dublin. The last story, The Dead can be considered Joyce’s first masterpiece, because it is denser and more elaborate than others. Each story describes a typical character of Dublin in a realistic way and with a lot of strong external details. The realism is mixed with symbolism, since external details generally have a deeper meaning. The themes are escape, paralysis and epiphany. Every character tries to escape from his reality but they failed. They are paralysed by the limitations imposed by the place and society they have to live in. The paralysis is physical: Dubliners are spiritually weak and afraid people, they are slaves of their familiar, moral, cultural, religious and political life. They accept their condition because they are not conscious of it or because they lack the courage to change it. During the development of the story the character experiences an epiphany, a sudden revelation provoked by a casual and common episode that, at a certain moment, led the character to have consciousness of his dark condition and to understand the sense of his whole life. Coming to consciousness or self-realisation marks the climax of these stories. Each story is told from the prospective of a character. Narrated monologue is used: it consists of the direct presentation of the protagonist’s thoughts through limited mediation on the part of the narrator, and allows the reader to acquire direct knowledge of the character. The linguistic register is varied, since the language used in all the stories suits the age, the social class and the role of the characters. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN - Joyce's experience is narrated in a novel he wrote in 1916. The protagonist is Stephen Dedalus, that represent Joyce: Stephen lives in Dublin, studies in a Jesuit school and lives a spiritual, moral and sexual crisis. He becomes aware that his destiny is to be a poet, realising that only by choosing "silence and exile" as his way of life, will he be able to reach his objectives. Both Dubliners and A Portrait can be considered traditional works for the literary technique even though they contain a new, more conscious and deeper way of looking into reality. ULYSSES - In 1922 Joyce published his masterpiece, an innovation both for the context and for the literary technique used by the author. The whole novel takes place on a single day, Thursday, June 16, 1904, which was special to Joyce because it was the day that Nora Barnacle, his future wife, show him her love. During the course of this day, three main characters wake up, go to Dublin and go to sleep 18 hours later. The central character is Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent: he leaves his home at 8 o’clock to buy his breakfast and returns finally at 2:00 of the following morning; in these hours he across many streets, attends a funeral and lives misadventures. During his day, Bloom meets Stephen Dedalus (the protagonist of A Portrait) and who becomes, momentarily, his adopted son: the common man saves the alienated artist from a fight, and takes him home where a paralysis prevents them from achieving a personal communion. Finally, there’s Bloom’s wife, Molly, a singer who is planning an afternoon of adultery with her music director. The book reproduces the Odyssey of Homer. Leopold Bloom is the modern Ulysses who goes through the streets of Dublin and when he comes home Molly (Penelope) is waiting for him. Stephen Dedalus, homeless and fatherless, corresponds to Homer's Telemachus. The 24 hours of Ulysses represent the 24 books and the adventures that Joyce's characters live are similar to those experienced by Homer's. The novel hasn’t a beginning or an ending: it is a series of particulars, of epiphanies narrated from the point of view of the character. This special technique allows the narrator to disappear completely from the narration and is known as "stream of consciousness": the continuous and uninterrupted flow of thoughts, expressed as they appear in the mind, without any logical and syntactical organisation. Joyce chose to eliminate punctuation in order not to interrupt the flow of thoughts. For his new technique Joyce’s books and others were banded. The most important structural device in the novel are the Homeric parallels and each chapter is additionally organized around a different hour, a colour, an organ of the body, a sense, a symbol, a narrative technique suitable for the subject-matter.