Scarica James Joyce: Ulysses e più Temi in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Joyce’s Ulysses While Joyce was publishing his book: ● Soviet Union was formed with one party ● Mussolini came to power in Italy ● new pope was elected (Pius XI) ● Tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered ● BBC radio services began ● Irish free state was set up Ulysses, novel by Irish writer James Joyce, first published in book form in 1922. Stylistically dense and exhilarating, it is generally regarded as a masterpiece and it is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey. All the action of Ulysses takes place in Dublin on a single day: as a matter of fact it is a detailed account of ordinary life on an ordinary Dublin day, June 16th, 1904 . PLOT Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Dubliner, leaves his home at eight o’clock on a Thursday morning in June. He spends the whole day wandering about Dublin, meeting people, thinking to his past life, to the unfaithfulness of his wife, Molly, and to the death of their little son. In a brothel he meets a young artist, Stephen Dedalus, who is completely drunk, and rescues him from a fight. He takes Stephen home with him, at two in the morning. In a short time Stephen leaves. Molly, who’s trying to get asleep, does not even hear them coming. CHARACTERS ➔ Leopold Bloom: he represents a common and ordinary man, and so humanity, he’s a parody of the wandering Ulysses of the Odyssey. Leopold is everything, he combines all human extremes. ➔ Molly Bloom: she represents the flesh, sensuality, sex and stands ironically for Penelope. She represents herself with flash and fecundity. Molly as Joyce wrote in a letter sent to his friend, is the clue of the book, she is matter, she is the foundation of the book because sexuality is the foundation of the book: for this reason Joyce considers the last part and Molly herself the only ones which can ancore the book to the Earth ➔ Stephen Dedalus: he represents the alienated artist and pure intellect and stands for Telemachus, as he is momentarily adopted by Leopold Bloom. "The mythical method" was a result of progress made by psychology, anthropology, ethnology rather than a "narrative method". It allowed Joyce to make a parallel with the "Odyssey" and provided the novel with a universal symbolic cross-temporal meaning and level (make an evident contrast between Ulysses and the modern hero who lives in a capitalistic society). Homer's myth was used to enlarge by resemblance the actions and people of a Dublin day to give them another dimension and to express the universal in particular. Joyce declared he wanted to write a "modern epic" in prose. All the 18 chapters are closely related to Homeric episodes (Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War), with an infinite amount of cross references and recurrent motifs. Each chapter corresponds to a scene, an hour, a body organ, an art, a colour and a symbol. UNA POSSIBILE CHIAVE DI LETTURA: The epic structure of the novel can be interpreted as a criticism of twenty century life, which Joyce considered unheroic and meaningless. Modern man is devoid of ideals and notions of valour. It has been commented that we know Bloom better than any other character of modern fiction. He represents the modern man in modern society; his figure gives a representation of the modern hero, that is an antihero. He is a typical member of the lower middle class man, vulgar and even disgusting and pathetic. He knows that Molly, his wife, betrays him. She is unintelligent and uninhibited; she is getting worse and worse after the death of
