James Joyce: Ulysses, Dubliners., Temi di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce: Ulysses, Dubliners. e più Temi in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE • was born in Dublin 1882 in a middle-class family • his father had been a supporter of the leader of the movement for Home Rule for Ireland. He is described as "at present a praiser of his own past". He became representative for Joyce of the failure of his own country • attended Jesuit school and studied modern language at University college in Dublin • influenced by Walter Pater • influenced by Norwegian dramatist Ibsen whose portraits of individuality suffocated by social limitations strongly reflect his own experience of provincial Ireland • finding life in Ireland as an obstacle to his own artistic development he first went to Paris, returned to Dublin and taught there for a while, then moved to Pola in 1904 and then to Trieste, which was under the Austrian government. 1905-1915 ITALIAN PERIOD Dubliners=a collection of shorts stories about the life of people in Dublin-->considered immoral for its pitiless portrait of city life, non successful in commercial terms but gained Joyce the admiration of Pound Eliot and Yeats A portrait of the artist as a young man=an account of his own growing up in Dublin The Exile begins the Ulysses • moved to Zurich at the outbreak of the World War I and then to Paris in 1920, considered as one of the prophets of Modernism 1920-1940 LIFE IN PARIS published Ulysses after being turned down by several publishers for obscenity Finnegans Wake=any attempts to realism is finally abandoned, talks about the cosmic dreams of a Irishman organized around a cyclic theory of history. language: words are broken off and recombined with others, erudite puns, parody • In 1940 France was occupied by the Germans and Joyce and his family returned to Zurich, where he died in 1941. JOYCE AND IRELAND complex relationship: seems to have rejected everything that was Irish, from nationalism to celtic Revival. Though, all of Joyce's works are centered in Ireland and Dublin, which is reproduced with precise details. THE ULYSSES first came out i Paris in 1922 In England it was banned for obscenity until 1936 theme: parody of the Homeric Odyssey: Joyce’s quotation: "The Ulysses is the epic of the human body, the various aspects of only one character". • tells the story of Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman, who wanders around the streets of Dublin just as homeric Ulysses wandered about the Mediterrean. But Leopold is an anti-hero because he is an ordinary men involved in banal and common activities: he gets up, goes to the funeral of a friend, has lunch and at midnight meets Stephen Daedalus and takes him home with him. He seeks new experiences; he looks for a new scientific reality and a new human relationship but he doesn’t find them he is a non-believing Jew and was born in exile condition • Stephen Deadalus is the anti-hero of Homeric Telemaco. He is an idealist who seeks spiritual values and rebels against the everyday, ordinary experience. He is a young man with literary ambitions who feels frustrated by Irish provincial life. He is evicted from his house and wanders around Dublin in search of a house. He is also searching a father figure, which he eventually finds in Bloom. Leopold Bloom and Stephen stick to a research condition. They are quite alike and complementary one another because they are not able to fulfill their expectations. • Molly Bloom in the antihero of Homeric Penelope, but unlike her she is not faithful to her husband: Penelope faithfully waited for her husband's return, avoiding the advances of her suitors, busying herself with a work that she never finishes, since at night she secretly unweaves what she has woven during the day. Molly, instead, is a semi-professional singer who has several lovers. Their relationship is typical of the lack of passion of modern life. • Also the structure is closely modeled on the Odyssey: the twenty-four hours of Bloom's day correspond to the 24 books of the classic epic the novel's 18 episodes corresponds to the same number of incidents, but these becomes parodic, as they are treated with comic circumspection. Through these episodes he shows that the problems and tragedies of the classical world are the same problem faced by modern man. The difference is that modern man is imperfect: he is not a hero, he is not loyal, honest, ready to defend his family, clever, able to deal with difficult situations, respectful towards God as Odysseus and as a consequence cannot rely on the kindness of the Gods to help him through his struggles In the first episode, Stephen is evicted from his home by his housemates, who mock him and deprive him of his rights, just as Telemaco is deprived of his father' protection and forced to leave his home by his mother's suitors In the episode called "Hades" Bloom goes to a funeral and thinks about the dead people he has known, which is a reference to Ulysses' descent to the underworld. Modern and traditional He deals with characters and the story in a modern way: characters are not followed from birth to death, or along the lines of a complex story; the story itself does not exists in the traditional sense of the world. THE LANGUAGE The language is the one of the psycho-emotional life and it is connected to perception data. Physical and psycho-emotional elements are not described but only suggested to the reader through the verbal symbolism associated to them. STERNE (1713-1768) More than one hundred years before Laurence Sterne, in his novel "Tristam Shandy" tried to represent the creative process of writing, subverting the realistic conventions that the novel was developing in the 18th century. TS was defined as an anti-novel, or as a meta-novel, because it is both a novel and a reflection of the author on the creative process of writing. • The novel is an autobiography of Tristram Shandy, who writes his memoirs in the fist-person singular, but the author does not tell his life: he focuses on small events. • time follows the logic digression and free associations of ideas • the narrator is always commenting on the process of writing • the reader is addressed to contribute to the book • uses typographical techniques to call attention to the materiality of the book and to show us directly the artificial nature of the novel and the illusion of realism, to represents his mind processes: curve=digression of the story, little curves=parenthesis, straight line=he hasn't stepped out of his way in the narration. DUBLINERS collection of 15 short stories realistic and evocative portrait of the life of ordinary people in Dublin arranges in 4 groups=4 phases of life theme: represents the failure of self-realization of an inhabitant in Dublin examined in psychological detail--> a significant theme is the feeling of paralysis that many of the inhabitants experience as a result of being tied to antiquated social traditions. This is also reflected in their relationships, in which free expression is inhibited by repressive moral codes-->"The centre of paralysis" (The Dead=culmination of this feeling) -->he himself left Ireland because he felt oppressed by its atmosphere (civil war) and had always had a complex relationship with Ireland shift from the particular to the universal: In parallel with his movement in life, his novels show a similar shift from the particular to the universal: from the short stories of Dubliners to the autobiographical novel a portrait, from the lyric style of a portrait to the lyric style of Ulysses. This shift from the particular to the universal, from the personal to the objective, is mirrored in the progression of stories themselves: the first 3 are in the 1st person while the rest are in the 3rd person. Realism: He is obsessed with realistic details of Dublin: extreme naturalism meets and mingles with extreme psychological analysis and symbolism. The book is realistic to the degree of perfectly recreating characters, places and idioms. Epiphany: On the other hand, he makes use of a symbolic effect, which gives common objects unforeseen deepness. Joyce himself gave the definition of epiphany=a sudden revelation in which "the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant". A sudden spiritual awakening is experiences, when ordinary thoughts and feelings come together to produce a new sudden awareness. (Woolf's idea of vision). Style: written in an apparent traditional way, contains many of the elements of Joyce experimental later work: absence of a moralizing narrative voice, description of inner thoughts, use of symbolism. Each story told from the perspective of a particular character rather than through an omniscient narrator. The Dead • begins with an after-Christmas dinner party at the house of 2 old unmarried sisters: miss Kate and miss Julia, who are also aunts of the protagonist, Gabriel • He goes to he party with his wife Gretta and the house becomes a sort of microcosmos of contemporary Ireland and its traditions • When they come back to their hotel room he realizes that she is crying: at the end of the party she suddenly had an epiphany. Listening to an old Irish song she suddenly remembered her first and perhaps only true love, Micheal Furey, a young man who she thinks died for her. • Gretta's epiphany will lead to Gabriel's own epiphany, beacuse he sees his wife as a woman he never really knew. • in the last scene of teh story, after Gretta tells the story of Micheal Furey, Gabriel, looking at the window at the all-covering snow, reflects on the significance of the most intense moments of existence, which fade like all the rest into oblivion. • Gretta has told her husband Gabriel about the boy mF, who died as a result of his passion for her by remaining outside her house one cold winter night and contracting pneumonia. She falls asleep, while Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, has his first epiphany: he realizes that "a man had died for her sake" and taht probably, he wouldn't do the same for her wife. • Reflecting upon it, he admits that her face "was no longer the face for which Micheal Furey had braved death". • Gabriel experiences an inward change that makes him examine his own life and human life in general He realizes that as Micheal, also his aunt Julia "would soon be a shade" and he would be sitting beside his aunt Kate, trying to think about how to console her, but would only find useless words. He keeps on reflecting about the passing of the time, the irremediable process of aging: "one by one they were all becoming shades". Gabriel sees himself as a shadow of a person, flickering in a world in which the living and the dead meet, in which everything is dissolving and falling apart, as it is marked by all the adjectives which refer to "dissolution" and "fading". The description of this collapsing world reminds of Yeats' "The Second Coming", in which he uses a series of symbol (such as the falcon that "cannot hear the falconer") to represent the cycle of history, or the "gyre", that is disaggregating. • Gabriel now recognizes, after hearing that Michael Furey’s memory lives on, that there is no division between leaving people and dead ones. As he looks out of his hotel window, he sees the falling snow, and he imagines it covering Michael Furey’s grave just as it covers those people still living, as well as the entire country of Ireland. • snow=symbol Throughout the text all manifestations of winter (cold, the color white, snow, and the season itself) usually represent mortality. The fact that snow falls indiscriminately “on both the living and the dead” all over Dublin highlights the fact that many Dubliners are living meaningless lives and are essentially dead while alive. This indiscriminate quality of snow, which is said to be falling all over Ireland, highlights the fact that mortality is universal, and also serves to unite the living and the dead. Some of the living, like Gabriel, have not really lived, and some of the dead, like Michael Furey, hold significance equal to that of the living, as in Gretta’s mind. So the living and the dead are not really that different, and the snow is a reminder that everyone will end with the same fate. • Joyce gives a picture of Gabriel's inner thoughts and feelings through the technique of interior monologue, which he developed in his later work