Scarica James Joyce: vita e opere e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce Life James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest surviving child of ten children, four boys and six girls. He was largely educated at Jesuits schools then he got into University College, Dublin, where he gained a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on modern languages in 1902. His interest was for a broader European culture ,and this led him to begin to think of himself as a European rather than an Irishman. Joyce believed that the only way to increase Ireland’s awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint. He established himself on the Continent and spent some time in Paris, where he intended to pursue a writing career ,but his mother’s fatal illness in1903 brought him back to Dublin. It was in this period that he began to seriously imagine his future career as a writer and published his first short story, The Sisters, in the Evening Telegraph. It would eventually serve as the opening story in his Dubliners collection. In June 1904 he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, a 20-year-old girl who was working as a chambermaid in a hotel. They had their first date on 16th June, which was to become the ‘ Blooms day’ of Ulysses. In 1905 they settled in Trieste, where Joyce started teaching English and made friends with Italo Svevo. Joyce had a lot of issues with publishers and printers because of the “obscene elements” in his prose. In 1915 they moved to Zurich (Trieste was occupied by the Austrian army) but he had financial difficulties, here he received the first of several anonymous donations that allowed him to keep writing. In 1920 they moved to Paris where he published Ulysses . His daughter’s mental illness worsened and she went to a mental hospital. Joyce blindness got worse and his father died. In 1940 France was occupied by Germany so they got back in Zurich where he died after a intestinal operation in 1941. Works Chamber Music (36 short poems) Dubliners (collection of short stories) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (semi-autobiographical novel) Ulysses Finnegans wake Style and Themes All his works are set in Ireland, mostly in Dublin. He wants to give a realistic portrait of life of the ordinary people. In spite of his Jesuit education, Joyce challenged Catholicism. His hostility towards the Church was the revolt of the artist-heretic against the official doctrine, it was like a conflict between a son and his parents. Joyce believed in the impersonality of the artist. The artist’s aim was to render life objectively, this necessarily led to the isolation and detachment of the artist from society. Since his works didn’t have to express his viewpoint he used different points of view and narrative techniques. He started with the realism and the disciplined prose of Dubliners, then he experimented with the use of the free direct speech and the interior monologue, finally he used the stream of consciousness in Ulysses. Language broke down into a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical connections, into infinite puns, and reality became the place of psychological projections, of symbolic archetypes and cultural knowledge.
