James Joyce, Ulysses e Dubliners, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce, Ulysses e Dubliners e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) Joyce is one of the greatest representatives of Modernism and one of the most important novelists of all time. He was born in Dublin in 1882 in a middle-class Catholic family, however during his childhood, his parents lost their wealth and his father lost his job as a tax collector. In 1898 Joyce started studying Italian, French and English at University College in Dublin, where he also started writing literary reviews and articles; then in 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, his future wife. When the director of the Berlitz Institute of Trieste offered him a teaching position, Joyce moved to the Adriatic seaport city (Austro-Hungarian at the time), where he worked on 2 of his best-known literary works: • Dubliners(1914): a collection of short stories written using a naturalistic style; • A portrait of the artist as a Young Man(1916): a sort of a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman. The protagonist of the book is Stephen Daedalus, a young artist who rebels against his country, his family and religion and leaves Ireland in a sort of self-imposed exile to find freedom. In Trieste he became friends with Italo Svevo, who greatly influenced his style and themes. In 1914 WWI broke out, he moved to Zurich, where he started working on his masterpiece: Ulysses (1922). In Zurich he also met the poet Ezra Pound. Despite its difficulty enhanced by the obsessive use of the stream of consciousness, the rudeness of its language and the frankness of some of its themes, Ulysses remains an unrivaled milestone in the development of Modernist writing and in 20th-century’s literature. In 1920 he moved to Paris and started working on his last novel, Finnegans Wake (1939). After the Germans occupied France in 1940, Joyce and his family went back to Zurich, where he died in 1941. JOYCE AND IRELAND: A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP Joyce's literary works reveal his complex relationship with Ireland: even though he left Dublin in 1904, he obsessively sets his works in Ireland, which he both loved and hated. His self-imposed exile allowed him to represent both Ireland and Dublin with an objective distance. • To him Ireland was a country dominated by stagnation and stasis, but was also his main source of inspiration: he always portrayed Irish people and places with vivid realism and attention. DUBLINERS 1914 THE STRUCTURE OF THE COLLECTION — Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories written in 1900 and published in 1914. They revolve around the lives of 15 typical ‘Dubliners’ and represent an ideal portrait of Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century. The stories can be divided into three main groups, each dealing with a particular theme. • The first three stories are about childhood and are suffused with a strong sense of disillusionment and failure. • These are followed by another group dealing with adulthood: Eveline belongs to this sub-section, which tackles issues such as man's impossibility to escape from suffering, the passivity of Irish people and the paralysis of their will. • The last group portrays the sterile relationship between Irish individuals and collective institutions, such as politics, the musical world and the Church. These stories, too, develop the concept of paralysis and its ramifications in private and public life. THE DEAD— The last story of the collection, it’s a portrait of the Irish middle class, stuck in a condition of irresolvable mediocrity and stubbornness. The protagonist Gabriel Conroy, is the prototype of the mediocre Irish middle-class man, an individual who lives his life like a dead person. THE CITY OF DUBLIN — One of the major themes of the stories contained in Dubliners is the city itself. He portrays a static and provincial town, a city without the cosmopolitan atmosphere of many other European capitals of that time. This affects the lives of its citizens, represented as prisoners of a city that doesn’t allow them to grow and to develop their full potential as human beings. PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL PARALYSIS — Besides Dublin, the characters are united by the experience of failure: they all have a desire: • they try to fulfill their lives by overcoming all the obstacles to this ambition, and ultimately surrender because they do not have the will to transform their desire into action. This universal condition of inaction affects all the inhabitants of Dublin and is defined by Joyce as 'paralysis'. In Dubliners paralysis is a spiritual stagnation of the self, a universal lack of growth that affects the whole Irish nation: meaning spiritual and physical death. In Joyce's stories Dublin becomes the prototype of the paralyzed city of modernity. This is underlined by Joyce himself, who wrote that he 'chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to [him] the centre of paralysis'. A WAY TO ESCAPE: EPIPHANY To him there is only one potential way to escape from the universal paralysis that affects the whole Irish nation: epiphany ('revelation' and 'manifestation'). With this Joyce refers to the moments in which the characters experience the sudden revelation of their condition of paralysis. This revelation does not lead to a real change in their lives: it enhances the awareness of their condition of paralysis. THE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE — The narrative technique in Dubliners is only apparently traditional. • These short stories are based on the rejection of the Victorian idea of the third-person omniscient narrator and on the use of an internal narrative perspective: each of the stories is narrated from the point of view of one of the characters. Here Joyce mixes realism with free direct speech and free direct thought, two techniques that anticipate some of his later experimental works. EVELINE SUMMARY Eveline Hill is a young woman living in Dublin with her father; she dreams of a better life and plans to sail to Buenos Aires with her lover Frank. Her desire to start a new life is a consequence of her father’s behavior: after her mother’s death he became abusive and started drinking, demanding her to economically support her and the family. She is torn between staying or leaving Dublin with Frank, her lover, to got to Buenos Aires. As Eveline recalls, she enjoyed the time when Frank wooed her, until her father argued with him; due to her father’s disapproval, they started to meet secretly. She holds two letters, one for her father and one for her brother Harry, as she thinks about the happy moments of her life, back when her mother was alive. She thinks back to the promise she made, to her mom, to take care of their home and starts to thinks that her life could be worse, despite it being hard. The sound of an organ reminds her of her mothers death and at the same time she remembers her mother’s sad life. • She then abruptly decides to leave with Frank to escape a similar fate. When she gets to the Dock in Dublin she suddenly appears detached, overwhelmed by the crowd around her, she then prays to God for direction. The boat whistle blows and Frank pulls on her hand but she resists. She doesn’t think back to her decision to leave, instead, she stays still and emotionless when Frank shouts for her and while the crowd carries him away. ANALYSIS — Eveline’s story illustrates the pitfalls of holding onto the past when facing the future. Hers is the first portrait of a female in Dubliners and it reflects the hard decision Irish women had to make between a domestic life rooted in the past and the possibility of a new married life abroad. At first she’s happy to leave her life, fearing the repetition of her mother’s mistake: a life of ’’commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness”. However, she immediately worries about the promise she made and feels unable to let go of those family relationships, clinging to older and happier memories. • Even if she sees Frank as her savior she cannot decide Between the call of the past and the call of the future. It’s fear of making her mother’s mistake that brings her to an Epiphany: she has to leave with Frank to run away from her miserable life. In the end she will end up the same way as her mother: no matter how much she desires to escape, she’ll always hold on more to the routines of her life. On the docks with Frank she wont be able to be faithful to her promise: it’s the first sign that she in fact hadn’t made a choice, but instead remains fixed in a circle of indecision. Instead of joining her lover on a different path, she stays still, paralyzed, as she fears that Frank will drown her in their new life. Her reliance on everyday rituals is what causes her to freeze and not follow Frank onto the ship.