James Joyce: The Irish Expatriate Writer and His Masterpiece Ulysses, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce: The Irish Expatriate Writer and His Masterpiece Ulysses e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce He was born in Dublin, in 1882 of a middle-class Irish catholic family. He was educated at catholic institutions run by the Jesuit order. He took a degree in modern languages, at University College, a catholic institution. The life in Ireland is an obstacle to his own artistic development, so in 1902 he left Ireland and lived as on exile mostly in Paris, Trieste and Zurich. In Trieste, he became the English tutor of Italo Svevo, that that convinced him to write. So in this period, he wrote Dubliners, so a collection of short stories and a partly autobiographical novel, and A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man. At the outbreak of the First World War Joyce went to Zurich where he started working in his masterpiece, Ulysses. In 1920 he moved to Paris, there he was considered one of the prophets of Modernism and there the Ulysses was finally published in 1922. Here he also wrote his last novel, Finnegans Wake, that come out in 1939. At the outbreak of the Second World War France was occupied by German, and he and his family returned to Zurich, where he died in 1941. The relationship between Joyce and Ireland is complex Even if Joyce forced himself to an exile from Ireland, in all his works there is the description of Dublin he knew with precise details. Indeed, He considered Dublin the “omphalos” of the world but he left Ireland because He wanted to become a European writer going beyond the narrow limits of the Irish culture. ULYSSES The publication of the Ulysses started on a periodic magazine in 1918, but was stopped because was considered obscene. For the same reason it was turned down by other publishing house. It was finally published in 1922 in Paris by Sylvia Beach (the owner of “Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop”). In England, Ulysses was banned for obscenity until 1936. Ulysses is takes place on June 16th, 1904 in Dublin. He describe the trivial experiences of three main characters: Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and Stephen Dedalus (the same protagonist of A Portrait) The novel is conceived as a parallel to Homer’s The Odyssey: Bloom corresponds to Ulysses, Molly to Penelope and Stephen to Telemachus. These likenesses between Ulysses and Odyssey have been deliberately chosen by Joyce to stress the sordid meanness of modern life compared with the splendour of a heroic age and to suggest the decline from the mythic and heroic to the human and mediocre.