James Joyce, the modernism, Eveline and Ulysses, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce, the modernism, Eveline and Ulysses e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! The modern novel Modernist literature has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America. • Modernism is characterized by a very self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, such as the Victorian novel. This was caused by the gradual transformation of British society, from the comfortable world of the Victorian age to the war years, marked by unrest and poverty. • The novelists had a new role; they had to mediate between the solid and unquestioned values of the past and the confused present. • Sigmund Freud’s theory of the psyche influenced the Modernist literature. He created a structural model of the psyche; it’s divided into three parts, which are the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the set of instinctual impulses lacking organization; the ego is the realist part; the superego has a critical role since it gives us the unnatural behavior caused by the society and the laws. • Modernist literature was also influenced by the philosopher William James. James, in his Principles of Psychology, held that our mind records every single experience as a continuous flow of “the already” into “the not yet”. • Henri Bergson made a distinction between historical time and psychological time. Historical time is external and measured by the hands of a clock. Psychological time is internal, subjective and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment. Bergson also suggested that a feeling or a thought could be measured in terms of the number of perceptions, memories and associations. • The modern novelists rejected omniscient narration and experimented new methods to portray individual consciousness. The point of view is now into the character’s mind. The analysis of the character’s mind was influenced by some theories about the simultaneous existence of different levels of consciousness and sub-consciousness. • The time is subjective and internal; if the distinction between past and present was meaningless in psychological terms, then there was no use in building a plot which followed a chronological sequence of events. It was not necessarily the time that revealed the truth about characters; it might unfold in the course of a single day, by observing the actions of a character. • The narrative techique that modern novelists used was the stream of consciousness and the interior monologue. The sentence “stream of consciousness” was coined by William James to define the continuous flow of thoughts and sensations into the human mind. This definition was applied to a kind of 20th-century fiction which focused on this inner process. The stream of consciousness is often confused with the interior monologue. The main features of the interior monologue are the verbal expression of the stream of consciousness, the frequent lack of chronological order, the narrator may be present, the formal logical order may be lost of lacking, the action takes place within the character’s mind and the speech may be immediate, without introductory expressions. • The psychological novelists centred their attention on the development of the character’s mind and on human relationships. For example, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf experimented with new narrative techniques, and they explored the characters’ mind giving voice to their thoughts. James Joyce Life • James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and he graduated in modern languages. • He was not interested in those political movements which had as their objective the freeing of Ireland from the English dominance. He thought of himself as a European rather than an Irishman. • His attitude contrasted with that of many of his contemporaries, who were trying to rediscover the Irish Celtic identity. Joyce, on the contrary, believed that the only way to increase Ireland’s awareness was to offer a realistic portrait of its life from an European point of view. • He fell in love with Nora Bernacle; they moved to Italy, in Trieste, in 1904. In Italy he became friend with Italo Svevo. • The years in Trieste were difficult, because of some financial problems and because he had problems with publishers and printers due to obscene elements in his prose. • His main works are Dubliners, Ulysses and A Portrait. • The war forced him to move to Switzerland, where he died in 1941. Ordinary Dublin • Though Joyce moved to France and Italy, he set his works in Dublin. • His aim was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. • By doing it, he represented the whole man’s mental and emotional reality, mixing it with the cultural heritage of modern civilisation. Style and technique • His works didn’t have to express the author’s point of view, but Joyce used different point of view and narrative techniques appropriate to the characters portrayed. • In his works, the use of direct speech, the interior monologue and the epiphany is frequent. • The epiphany is a technique used by Joyce and it impied the “sudden revelation of a hidden reality” though “casual words or events”. • The main feature of his style is the lack of punctuation and grammatical connections; he reproduces the wanderings of the mind. This way of writing wants to underline the flow of his thoughts. The thoughts are free to move backwards and forwards in time to mix past, present and future.