James Joyce: vita e opere, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce: vita e opere e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce His life James Joyce was an Irishman so Ireland contributed a lot to English literature. He was born in Dublin in 1882 into a middle class Irish catholic family and attended the University College Dublin where he graduated in 1902. An important influence in his childhood was that of Irish Nationalist politics, but after the death of Parnell, the leader of the Irish Home Rule movement, he felt disillusioned. After graduating, he went to Paris to study medicine, but soon devoted himself to literature, but then because of his mother’s death, he returned to Ireland, where in 1903 he met Norah Barnacle, who was to be his lifelong companion. They left Ireland and went first to Poland and then to Trieste, where he stayed teaching English and writing his first book “Dubliners'', a collection of short stories and “A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, where he explained his theory of the artist. His pupils included Ectore Schmitz, that to say Italo Svevo, at that time an unknown author, whose novels “Una vita” and “Senilità” had been ignored by the critics. With the outbreak of the War, Joyce took his family to Zurich and although he remained poor, his reputation was growing, at least in intellectual circles. In Zurich, he worked on a new novel, “Ulysses”, in which experimentation was at the highest level. In 1920, he moved to Paris, where he could devote himself completely to art without financial problems. In Paris he wrote “Finnegans Wake” where its technical experimentations reached its best, because while in the other works he talked about people’s thoughts, in this novel, he deals with what people think when they dream, so dream speech. With the outbreak of the War in 1939, he returned to Zurich, where he died in 1941. Features of his works and his way of thinking Joyce believed that the artist should be invisible in his works, in the sense that he must not express his own point of view, but try to express the thoughts and experiences of other men, therefore he advocated the total objectivity of the artist and his independence from moral, religious and political pressures. This is important because in order to be autonomous, free and objective an artist should free himself from all moral, religious and political pressures. This is also one of the reasons why he decided to leave Dublin and to move abroad. Apart from rejecting irish nationalism, Joyce rejected irish life too, however he set all his novels in Dublin, the capital of the country he had grown up in and rejected. He’s concerned with the particulars of life there, in fact especially in Dubliners, he wanted to give a portrait of the life of ordinary people in their everyday life. He managed to give a portrait of the characters’ inner emotional life, their thoughts and emotions focused in the heritage of modern civilization. So he spent nearly all his adult life abroad choosing a voluntary exile in Trieste, Zurich, Paris because these towns were more open to the influence of other intellectual traditions. He was deeply interested in all aspects of modern culture and in Freudian theories, that to say psychoanalysis and all the experimentation affecting all fields of art. He was interested in what the other writers wrote in Europe like Proust, Dostojevski and Flaubert who shared his same view of writing novels. As a result of his interest in experimentation, he created a new kind of dream language, a mixture of existing words, invented words, combination of existing and non existing words, disordered syntax, non existent punctuation, no grammatical connection, however this process is gradual. In his first book “Dubliners”, the way of writing is more conventional, he introduces the characters’ thoughts, emotions and feelings but on an understandable level. With the passing of years, while he was more and more convinced that it was important to experiment in this field, works became much more difficult, like “Ulysses” and especially “Finnegans Wake”, which presents the dream language. The artist’s task was to present objectively his character’s thoughts, his works didn’t have to express the author's point of view. As a consequence he made use of new techniques such as the free direct speech, the epiphany and the interior monologue. As a result of his interest towards experimentation, he created a new language. He also presented a subjective perception of time and so the objective narrator disappears, because there is no longer an objective reality to describe. Before, the narrator was a kind of guide who presented a reality that was accepted by everyone; now reality is subjective, everyone reacts to the same event in a different way according to his own experience and memories. Joyce’s stories lack a traditional plot since it is not important anymore, events are important only in the measure in which they affect people’s mind and their psychology. His stories concentrate on the analysis of a particular moment and the portrait of the character is based on introspection, that is subjective and follows the character’s psychology. Time is the inner time, so the psychological time. There is no chronological time, that to say a sequence of events, one following the other in a simple and logical way. Instead, there is psychological time, which is internal, subjective, measured by the relative emotion intensity of a moment: when we think, we don’t pay attention to preserve a chronological sequence of thoughts, they are in our minds in mixed order, therefore present past and future are mixed together, because time is a continuous flow and not a sequence of events. Dubliners ‘Dubliners’ is the first novel in which the new concepts are introduced. Joyce’s first period of work is marked by a realistic technique. There is a plot that develops and there are a lot of details. The syntax is logical, the language is not distorted but it reflects everyday’s speech, the style is socially realistic with a lot of details but there are also remarkable moments of sudden insight, characteristic of Joyce’s art and called epiphanies. The word ‘Epiphany’ refers to a moment of Christian religion called Epifania, the showing of the baby Christ to the magis, so it’s a moment of revelation. Joyce adopts this expression in his novels to signify a sudden revelation, the moment when a sudden spiritual awakening is experienced. All the details: gestors, thoughts, objects and feelings come together to produce this sudden awareness. It is a kind of spiritual awakening and manifestation that leads the character to a self revelation about himself and about the reality around him. What is important in the novel is no longer the plot but this moment. The revelation is not for the character in the story but for the reader because he understands something about himself and about his own life, the reality surrounding him. The epiphany is not always positive, we understand something about ourself or other people close to us, that was there in front of us but that we could not perceive till that moment. It is like a broken veil in front of our eyes. This work is made up of 15 stories, which were written by 1905, except for The Dead, that is the last and most ambiguous story and was written in 1907. The work was written when Joyce was only 23 years old, he was a genius and this story presents the same particular structure, the same themes, symbols and narrative techniques. The work is an acute analysis of Dublin's life that he considered the centre of paralysis. This paralysis is mainly a cultural paralysis, because people in this town, according to him, are too tied to cultural and social traditions and this determines a kind of cultural limit since they are not open to what came from abroad in terms of culture, philosophy and open mindness. The moral paralysis is linked to religion, politics and culture. Dubliners accept their condition because they aren’t aware of it, but also because they are unable to change their life. This is something that emerges in his works, these people are spiritually weak, they are slaves of their families and of the social and cultural traditions. Joyce wanted to show this paralysis but the most important moment in the story is when the paralysis is revealed, when the reader becomes aware that Dubliners are trapped in this paralysis and are unable to change their life. ● The main theme in the stories is people's incapacity to escape from their condition. ● The omniscient narrator disappears and the reader follows the thoughts of the characters that are introduced to make the reader aware of what happens in the character's mind. ● The language is important to understand the psychology of the character, their inner life, because the language of the mind reveals and depends on many factors that age, sex, education, social and cultural context. "The Dead'' is the culmination of the feeling of stagnation which characterises the spiritual life of the city. The stories are arranged in thematic sequences divided into 4 sections, each of which represent a stage in life: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. Then there is The Dead, which stands apart and is the last story. The story forms the climax to the theme of decay and stagnation that runs through all the stories, intended to show the spiritual paralysis of Dublin, the heart of modern Ireland. It also goes beyond the stories by developing a more compassionate view of the life of the characters, as well as moving away from the realistic and objective presentation of their life. In this book Joyce provides a more intimate study of the characters' inner life, he provides the stream of consciousness. The dead The dead is the last story Joyce wrote to complete “Dubliners”. This story is different from the others; the theme of paralysis and epiphany are always present, but there is a new different attitude of the writer towards the characters because there is a more compassionate view of their lives and this forms the climax to the theme of decay and stagnation that runs through all the stories, intended to show the spiritual paralysis of Dublin, the earth of modern Ireland. The more passionate view of the lives of the characters is developed, as well as moving away from the rigorous, realistic and objective presentation of their lives which is the dominant approach in the rest of the book. Joyce is moving towards a more intimate study of his characters inner lives in a way that was to be more fully developed in the stream of consciousness of the later novels. The story can be divided into 2 sections: ● the first takes place at a dinner party shortly after Christmas and represents Dublin’s life completely, because the main character is Gabriel who is a teacher and at the beginning he is presented as a selfish man, concentrated on himself, on his pride and achievements and proud of himself. He takes part in a dinner party organised by his aunts and he has a central role, because he delivers his speech which is applauded by everyone there and he is satisfied with himself. ● However, in the second part things change because Gabriel and his wife Gretta come back to their room in a hotel, Gabriel is happy and consumed with physical passion, but she is far away from him and she is crying because of a song she has listened to at the party which reminded her of a previous lover, a young man, Michael Furey, who died for her love when they were young and this has provoked a lot of emotions in her, so she cries and then she falls asleep.