James Joyce: Ulysses and Dubliners, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce: Ulysses and Dubliners e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce Life and Works James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 in a poor family with ten children. He none the less attended the most prestigious Jesuit schools and the University College of Dublin, where he demonstrated extraordinary academic ability. He went to Paris with the intention of studying medicine and then changed his mind, concentrating in writing poems and developing his highly distinctive aesthetic theories. He also moved to Trieste in 1905. He published Dubliners in 1914, a collection of tales whose protagonists live in Dublin. At the outbreak of the World War I Joyce and his family moved to Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, where they remained until 1919. The war years were an extremely fruitful period for Joyce and in this period he started writing his masterpiece, Ulysses, which, after being declared obscene in England and USA, was published in Paris in 1922. In the same year Joyce started working on his huge experimental novel, Finnegans Wake, whose departure from the rules of the traditional fiction was to be even more radical that Ulysses had been, completely breaking down English syntax and grammar and inventing its polylinguistic vocabulary. The work was completed and published in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. He died in Zurich in 1941. Epiphanies Joyce's stories and novels are characterised by peaks of intensity in the narration that the writer calls "epiphanies". An epiphany is a sudden revelation in which "the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant". It is a moment in which a sudden spiritual awakening is experienced, when ordinary thoughts and feelings come together to produce a sudden awareness. This instant of intensity can be compared to Woolf's idea of "vision". Dubliners Joyce first short stories were published in 1914 in a collection called Dubliners, although all the stories of the book were written before 1907. They form a realistic and highly suggestive portrait of the lives of ordinary people in Dublin. The stories are arranged in four groups that correspond to four phases of life: 1. Childhood: for example "The Sisters" 2. Adolescence: "Eveline" 3. Maturity: "A painful Case" 4. Public life: "The Dead" A significant theme in all the stories is the feeling of paralysis that many of the characters experience as a result of being tied to antiquated and limited cultural and social traditions. This is also reflected in their relationships in which free expression is inhibited by repressive moral codes. Joyce himself defined Dublin as "the centre of paralysis". The last story, "The Dead", can be considered the culmination of the feeling of stagnation which characterises the spiritual life of the city and pervades the atmosphere of all fifteen stories. Stylistically speaking, the stories in Dubliners are written in an apparently traditional way. However, the descriptive realism which permeates them already contains many of the elements of Joyce's more experimental later work, such as the absence of a moralising narrative voice, description of characters' inner thoughts and use of symbolism. Each story is told from the perspective of a particular character rather than through an omniscient narrator. 2 Ulysses The plot Published in 1922, Ulysses represents a high point of Modernism. In Joyce's masterpiece not much happens in terms of actual events. It basically tells the story of a day in the life of advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, who gets up, walks around Dublin, meeting various people along the way, including the indigent writer Stephen Dedalus with whom he visits a brothel and gets drunk, before finally going home and laying beside his wife Molly. Of course in reality things are not so simple. Bloom's wanderings are made to produce, imitate and occasionally parody the epic travels of Ulysses in Homer Odyssey. Bloom is not the only character in the book who is based on Homeric model. Below is a basic scheme of correspondence: The modern anti-hero The book parallelism with The Odyssey extends to its structure. The 18 episodes which comprise the novel are modeled on equivalent episodes in Homer's text, but in Ulysses they become parodic or are treated with comic circumspection. He shows that problems, conflicts, triumphs and tragedies of the classical world are the same problems faced by modern man. The difference is that modern man is imperfect. He is no hero and he cannot rely on the kindness of the gods to help him through struggles. However, this very ordinariness of Joyce's characters contains within it a depth and vitality which no classical hero possesses. The odyssey Odysseus/Ulysses: the Greek soldier and hero whose ship, returning from Trojan wars, is blown off course. The finds himself delayed by a series of bizarre and perilous events, which he survives using his wits and manages to return to Ithaca. Telemachus: son of Ulysses awaiting his father's return is forced to share his home with his mother's suitors who treat him badly and deny him his rights. Penelope: wife of Ulysses who faithfully awaits her husband's return, avoiding the advances of her suitors by weaving a work which never comes to an end, since at night she secretly unweaves what she has woven during the day. Ulysses Leopold Bloom: a middle-aged Jewish advertising canvasser who steps out of the house one morning, leaving his wife asleep in bed, to go wandering around Dublin on a series of inconclusive errands during which he meets the young writer Stephen Dedalus. Stephen Dedalus: indigent and pretentious young writer whose companions evict him from the temporary home they have made in a coastal tower. Forced to wander the streets of Dublin in search of a new home, and a substitute father, Stephen meets Bloom who offers to take him into his home. Molly Bloom: wife of Bloom, Molly is a semi- professional singer and an adulterous wife who has had string of lovers. While Bloom is out on his wanderings she is meeting her latest boyfriend, Blazes Boylan.