James Joyce: Life and Major Works, Including Ulysses, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica James Joyce: Life and Major Works, Including Ulysses e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, into a Catholic middle-class family. He was educated at Jesuit boarding schools. He attended the university college Dublin where he studied foreign languages. After graduating, he left Dublin and he went to Paris to study medicine, which he abandoned later. He became active in theatrical and literary circles and began writing articles. In 1904 he began to Write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the same year he met Nora Barnacle, his future wife. Between 1904 and 1920 Joyce and Nora moved to various cities in Europe: Trieste, Zürich, Rome, Pola and Paris. Joyce died in Zürich in 1941. His major works were Dubliners a short-story collection published in 1914; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a novel published in 1916; Ulysses a novel published in 1922; and Finnegans Wake a novel published in 1933. The setting of most of his works is Ireland, especially Dublin. Time is perceived as subjective. The author’s task was to render life objectively. This necessary led to the isolation and detachment of the artist from society. Great importance is given to the inner world of a characters. Joyce used different points of view and narrative techniques. Ulysses Ulysses was a novel written by Joyce, published in full in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, an American bookseller. In her book-shop the most important English-speaking intellectuals of the time gathered: Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Beckett, Joyce. In Great Britain, the book was banned for obscenity till 1936. The plot → Ulysses tells the story of a day, 16th of June 1904 from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner of Jewish-Hungarian origin who works as an advertising agent (canvasser). He is the Ulysses of the title of the book and he wanders the streets of Dublin just as Homer’s Ulysses wandered about the Mediterranean area. What happens to Bloom is far less heroic: it is in fact common and normal. He gets up, goes to a Turkish bath, prepares Molly’s breakfast, defecates, goes to the post office, drops in at a funeral, has lunch, walks, goes to a library, buys things, sees some acquaintances, meets people, goes to a pub, sees a sunset on a beach and is excited by a girl, pays a visit to a friend in hospital, ends up in a brothel where he meets Stephen Dedalus and takes him home with him where Molly is trying to sleep. The characters: • Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) → he is a 38 years old advertising canvasser in Dublin. Bloom was raised in Dublin by his Hungarian Jewish father and his Irish Catholic mother. He enjoys reading and thinking about science and inventions and explaining his knowledge to others. Bloom is compassionate and curious and loves music. He is preoccupied by his estrangement from his wife, Molly. Two emotional crises plague Bloom’s otherwise cheerful demeanor throughout Ulysses—the breakdown of his male family line and the infidelity of his wife, Molly. The untimely deaths of both Bloom’s father and only son, Rudy, lead Bloom to feel cosmically lonely and powerless. • Molly Bloom (Penelope) → she is Leopold Bloom’s wife. Molly Bloom is 33 years old, plump with dark coloring, good-looking, and flirtatious. She is not well-educated, but she is nevertheless clever and opinionated. She is a professional singer, raised by her Irish father, Major Brian Tweedy, in Gibraltar. Molly is impatient with Bloom, especially about his refusal to be intimate with her since the death of their son, Rudy, eleven years ago. • Stephen Daedalus (Telemachus) → he is an aspiring poet in his early twenties. Stephen is intelligent and extremely well-read, and he likes music. He seems to exist more for himself, in a cerebral way, than as a member of a community or even the group of medical students that he associates with. Stephen was extremely religious as a child, but now he struggles with his faith because of his mother’s death, which occurred less than a year ago. The structure of the book → Ulysses is divided into 3 books or sections for 18 episodes: • Book 1 (chapters 1-3): The focus is on Stephen Dedalus, a young aspiring writer who has just returned from Paris. This section presents Stephen's life on a typical day in which he finds Dublin depressing. He is pessimistic about realizing his dream to become a published author. • Book 2 (chapters 4-15): The focus is on Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising representative. This section presents his wandering through Dublin on an ordinary day. Joyce describes in detail both Dublin and Bloom, presenting his free-flowing thoughts– many of them either about his unfaithful wife, Molly, or other women. • Book 3 (chapters 16-18): The focus is on Leopold, Stephen, and Molly. Bloom and Dedalus meet each other. Dedalus goes to Bloom's home and talks with him for several hours. The novel ends with a chapter on Molly. It consists of more than 30 pages occupied by seven sentences with no punctuation except for the period at the end of the novel. Ulysses is closely modelled on the Odyssey. The 18 chapters corresponds to episodes in the Odyssey and the way the epic is played against the modern, in a variety of ways, is one of the imaginative and linguistic triumphs of the book. For example: - the name Stephen Dedalus: Stephen is the first Christian martyr and Dedalus is the name of the legendary architect of the Minoan who built the famous Maze - in the first episode called “Telemachus” Stephen is evicted from his home Martello Tower on the coast by his housemates who mock and deprive him of his rights, just as Ulysses’ son was deprived of his father’ protection and finally forced to leave his home because of his mother’s suitors (Joyce himself had to leave Martello Tower) - another episode is called “Hades”: Bloom goes to a funeral at Dublin’s cemetery and thinks about the dead people he has known which is a clear reference to Ulysses’ descent in the underworld. - in the “Circe” episode Bloom and Stephen meet in a brothel. Ulysses was designed as a detailed account of ordinary life on an ordinary Dublin day. Consequently, Dublin becomes itself a character in his novel. Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom are more than individuals. They represent two aspects of human nature: Stephen is pure intellect and embodies every young man seeking maturity; Molly stands for flesh, since she identifies herself totally with her sensual nature and fecundity; Leopold is everybody, the whole of mankind. Joyce used a method to connect past and present which was employed. This method is defined as a Mythical Method: it consists in creating a continuous parallel between past and present, through a complex web of allusions. The mythical method allows the author to make a parallel with the Odyssey and provides the book with a symbolic, cross-temporal meaning. Techniques and styles → Joyce combined several methods to present different situations and issues in the book. The book is written using many different styles and linguistic