Joyce: features, Dubliners, Ulysses, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Joyce: features, Dubliners, Ulysses e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE Features Setting: he set all his works in the city of Dublin, though he went into voluntary exile Aim: to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people and represent the man’s mental and emotional reality In spite of his Jesuit education he developed a strong hostility towards the Catholic church and religious institutions Style Impersonality: the narrator needs to describe reality and life objectively in order to give back to the reader a true image of it Different points of views ➞ each time Dublin is described through the eyes of a different character, so each time we have different impressions of the city The portrait of the character is based on introspection rather than on description: greater importance given to the inner world of the characters (what happens inside his mind), rather than to the plot; also time is perceived as subjective n.b. Gradual evolution • Dubliners: realism, disciplined prose, different points of views, free direct speech (already used by Woolf), the prose contains all the elements of the syntax • Ulysses: interior monologue with two levels of narration Dubliners some of the stories were published in 1914 in the newspaper “The irish homestead” with a pseudonym: • Stephan: due to his catholic education, Saint Stephan was the first martyr • Dedalus: which recalls the idea of escape from a place in which you’re trapped and that doesn’t allow you to be free; the desire to "fly" above the constraints of religion, nationality, and politics Setting All the stories are set in Dublin ➞ place where true feeling and compassion for others do not exist, dominated by cruelty and selfishness; “it seemed to me the centre of paralysis” ↳ even if Joyce was able to escape the city for good himself, Dublin always remained in his mind, he couldn’t get rid of it • Victorian writers: celebrated the developments in civilization that came along with the rise of cities • Modernist novelist: hostile to city life, it degraded its citizens (Joyce) n.b. Dublin was not well described: Dublin publishers refused to publish it cause they claimed that he had given a negative description of their city and people Structure 15 short stories grouped in four sections which represent the four steps of human life: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life Last story ➞ The dead: late addition; it summarizes themes and motifs; it functions as an epilogue; Dubliners are paralyzed, unfree so they’re basically dead Characters picture of Dubliners as afflicted people because of the oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural and economic forces on their lives; prisoners of a city in which they’re trapped and unable to escape because of their spiritual weakness Realism: realistic description ➞ abundance of external details, even the most unpleasant and depressing ones Symbolism ➞ external details generally have a deeper meaning • Religious symbolism • Color symbolism: brown, grey and yellow suggest the pervading atmosphere of despair and paralysis Aim: to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through the analysis of the particular; he discloses human situations and banal moments which eventually leads to a moral, social or spiritual revelation Style • Childhood section: first person narrator who remains nameless and not identified, describes events from the point of view of the young boy, this allows the reader to penetrate the boy’s mind and understand him better • Other 12 stories: third person narrator, shares a particular character’s perspective Interior monologue the narrator tends to disappear in the interior monologue the protagonist’s pure thoughts are introduced without any reporting verbs or grammatical structure it allows the reader to acquire direct knowledge of the character’s mind Language: simple, objective, neutral; different linguistic registers (mimetic language) ➞ adapted to the characters according to their age, social class and role Themes Paralysis • physical: resulting from external forces • moral: linked to religion, politics and culture Dubliners accept their condition either because they are not aware of it or because they lack the courage to break the chains that bind them Epiphany: the sudden spiritual manifestation, caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation, which reveals the character’s inner truths = revelatory moment; it provokes a desire to escape, but none of them succeeds in freeing themselves (failure to find way out of paralysis) Ulysses Publication (1922) Very hard process ➞ he met many problems while writing and while trying to find a publisher: he was in trouble with publishers and printers because of supposedly obscene elements in his prose In 1922 Ulysses was published as a complete novel thanks to the support of Silvia Beach, an american-born bookseller who lived in Paris by a still existing publishing house: Shakespeare’s company Setting in time and place A single day ➞ Thursday 16th June 1904 (special to Joyce because it was the day that his future wife Nora Barnacle made her love clear to him) ***unlike Omero’s tale*** Dublin: the protagonist moves from place to place in Dublin before going home ➞ not just a physical journey but also symbolic: a continuous research, mix of different states of mind and places, he wants to show that a single day can become a sort of a universe, metaphor for the moral journey of anyone of us ➪ ordinary day of an ordinary life of an ordinary man, nothing extraordinary or peculiar Relation to Odyssey ➞ structural framework for Ulysses Joyce arranges its characters and events around Homer’s heroic poem Like the Homeric poem, Ulysses is divided in three section: Telemachia, Odyssey, Nostos Each chapter is organized around a different hour, a color, an organ of the body, a sense, a symbol, a narrative technique suitable for the subject-matter es. Circe: episode of the magician takes place in the brothel, around midnight, it’s a sort of hallucination, a drama inside the novel where the characters are playing parts es. Lestrygonians: aggressive cannibal people, takes place at 1pm at lunch, organo del corpo chiamato in causa è l’esofago, punto di vista è all’interno dell’apparato digerente di Bloom Characters ➞ modern version of the great protagonists • Leopold: Odysseus; advertising canvasser, protagonist, ordinary, common man, not observing jew (➞ to be errant is characteristic of the Jew); • Molly: Penelope, Leopold’s wife; voluptuous singer, unlike Penelope, she’s unfaithful to Leopold, she plans to meet her lover (music teacher) while Leopold is not home; pleasant looking, sensual woman; symbol of flesh, sensuality, fecundity • Stephen: Telemachus; Leopold’s young accountant; pure intellect, ambitious man, specimen of every young man seeking maturity; Joyce’s alter ego ➪ Molly and Stephen: two different aspects of human nature; Mr Bloom stands for the whole mankind Leopold during his wandering meets Stephen: the alienated common man rescues the alienated artist from a brothel and takes him home where the paralysis of their fatigue prevents them from achieving personal communion Narrative techniques ➞ revolutionary prose Mythical method Revolutionary prose: new form of prose based on ‘the mythical method’, resulting from the progress made by psychology, ethnology and anthropology throughout centuries ➞ this allowed the author to make a parallel with the Odyssey and provides the book with a symbolic meaning Homer’s myth was used to enlarge by resemblance and difference the actions and people of a Dublin day, to give them another dimension and to express the universal in the particular (everything is constricted in one single day) it created a new form of realism Collage technique • fusion of every narrative technique explored so far from every author • the stream of consciousness + cinematic + dramatic dialogue + juxtaposition of events • each section is narrated in a different technique suitable for the subject-matter n.b. similar to the techniques used by the cubist artists who depicted a scene from all perspectives. Stream of consciousness: characters show their thoughts directly through interior monologue, sometimes in an incoherent and syntactically unorthodox way; the protagonist’s thoughts are introduced without any reporting verbs or grammatical structure Language is rich in puns, paradoxes, images, symbols and also many words invented by Joyce himself (compound words)**; different linguistic registers to give voice to the unspoken activity of the mind ** also carried out by Shakespeare, the two authors who renovate the english language which was not suitable for they wanted to write ➪ it becomes a sort of encyclopedic novel due to the variety of style, symbology, discipline and field of knowledge involved in the narration or conversation of the characters: combination of any possibile narrative technique and mention of every possible field of knowledge