Scarica James Joyce - Ulysses e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce: “Ulysses”. Published in 1922, Ulysses represents a high point of Modernism; it was considered a scandal for his age because of its sexual frankness and it was censured in America and England until 1936. It basically tells the story of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish advertising canvasser who gets up, walks around Dublin, meeting various people around the way, including the young writer Stephen Dedalus, with whom he visits a brothel and gets drunk, before finally going home and lying beside his wife Molly. The plot and theme of James Joyce's Ulysses centre on life as a journey: he based his novel on the structure of one of the greatest and most influential works in world literature, The Odyssey, by Homer. In this epic poem of ancient Greece, Homer presented the journey of life as a heroic adventure. The protagonist of this epic tale, Odysseus (Ulysses), encounters many perils, including giants, angry gods, and monsters, during his voyage home to Ithaca, after the Trojan War. Joyce presents this journey as boringly monotonous, dreary, and uneventful. Joyce's Ulysses is a Jew of Hungarian origin, Leopold Bloom, who lives in Dublin; his adventure consists of getting breakfast, feeding his cat, visiting pubs or restaurants, and thinking about his unfaithful wife. The parallel with the Homeric poem is developed in more detail in each of the sections or chapters into which the book is divided. There are eighteen in all, each one corresponding to one of the episodes in the Odyssey, although not in the same order. The first episode called “Telemachus”, echoes the theme of the first book of the Odyssey , which describes the situation of the son of Ulysses forced to share his home with his mother’s suitors. The second chapter is called “Nestor” after the wise king who gives Telemachus good advice; in Ulysses the counterpart of Nestor is Mr. Deasy, the headmaster of the school where Stephen does some teaching. Another example is Bloom's attendance at a funeral in a chapter entitled "Hades." This chapter parallels an episode in The Odyssey in which Ulysses visits Hades, the land of the dead. Joyce is suggesting, by means of this parallelism , that Bloom is a modern Ulysses, an archetypal hero, who can stand for humanity. Ulysses has three main sections, as follows: - Section 1 “Telemachiad”(Chapters 1-3): the focus is on Stephen Dedalus, a young writer who has just returned from Paris. This section presents Stephen's life on a typical day in which he finds Dublin depressing. He is pessimistic about realizing his dream to become a published author.
