Modernism and James Joyce "Dubliners" and "Evelin", Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Modernism and James Joyce "Dubliners" and "Evelin" e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! MODERNISM pag 318 Modernism is an international movement which involved many forms of art like literature ,music, visual art and cinema in the first decades of the 20th century. Modernism as a literary movement is associated with the period after WWI that had shaken the certainties of the society. The Modernist wanted to break with the past and wanted to find new fields of investigation such as urbanization, technology, mass communication and treat them through new forms of experimentation. All artistic forms of Modernism share common features: - The distortion of the forms (Cubist, Spanish artist P.Picasso or French one G. Braque) -The breaking down of limitations in space and time -The emphasis on subjectivity (provided by the third-person narrator)-The use of allusive languages and the use of new words.-The intensity of the isolated moment-Importance of unconsciousness as consciousness -Need to reflect the complexity of modern life in artistic form. Novelist and poets drew inspiration from classical and new cultures to create a new subjective mythology while artists considered the past as a source to be remodeled in a personal way. There are also influences of Freud and Bergson in the use of James Joyce’s flow of consciousness technique but also in the process of dissolution of the novel that began in 18th century; by absorbing past and contemporary influences from abroad, English literature was becoming cosmopolitan. THE MODERN NOVEL pag 322,323 The origin of the novel were bourgeois in 18th\19th centuries, the novel was deeply connected to the society and the recurring theme was the acquisition or loss of a social status. The novelist was the mediator between the characters and the reader, and told the events in chronological order and in a more or less objective way. The transition from Victorian to the modern novel was caused by a transformation of the society which in a few years went from a comfortable period to the inter-war years; so they need to change and from a literary point of view the novelists had a new role: being the mediator between the unquestioned values of the past and the confused present, highlighting the complexity of the unconscious. The new conception of time and Freud’s new theory also contributed.The novelists rejected omniscient fiction because it didn’t represent the reality of a world that had political, social and technological upheavals. They experimented with the new ways to represent individual consciousness, so the point of view shifted to the internal world of character’s mind. Of course the analysis of a character’s consciousness was influenced by theories of different levels of consciousness\subconsciousness and determines the personality of every human being. Even time is treated differently, it becomes subjective and internal since the past continued to exist in the present, the story could also unfold in a single day through for example what Joyce called an Epiphany, the sudden revelation of an interior reality caused by trivial events of everyday life. The technique used by the novelists was the stream of consciousness, a continuous stream of thoughts and feelings that characterizes the human mind.The interior monologue is the verbal expression of this psychic phenomenon. Three groups of novelists: I GROUP: made up of psychological novelists who deal with character’s mind and his human relationships (J.Conrad,D.H Lawrence) II GROUP: novelists who have experimented with subjective narrative techniques, exploring the mind of the characters and giving voice to their thoughts (J.Joyce,V.Woolf III GROUP: dealt with social and political problems, the attention was focused on the society (Marxist sympathies) JAMES JOYCE pag 372,373,374 Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, he was educated at jesuit schools before enrolling at the university where he earned a degree in arts with a focus on modern languages. Joyce settled on the continent and spent some time in Paris, where he intended to pursue a writing career but he had to return to Dublin due to his mother’s fatal illness. It was in this period that he began to imagine his future career as a writer in fact he published his first short story “The sisters in the evening telegraph”. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle and he fell in love with her, they had the first date on 16th June, which was to become the blooms day of Ulysses. He settled in Trieste in 1905 where he taught English, and became friends with I.Svevo. Those were difficult years and he managed to publish Dubliners, a collection of 36 short stories about Dublin and its life, was published on the eve of WWI. Attracting the attention of the poet Ezra Pound who helped him to print his semi-autobiographical novel. Joyce moved to Zurich with her family and despite his publications he continued to have financial problems until he received numerous anonymous donations that allowed him to write the novel “Ulysses” which was suspended in 1920 on charge of obscenity. Back in Paris he managed to publish Ulysses, this novel receives praise but also sharp criticism; but also this novel was acclaimed and T.S Eliot declared that Ulysses was the most important expression which the modern age has found. This period was successful but however, characterized by the worsening of her daughter’s mental illness until she was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Paris. He continued to write and make , despite his increasing blindness and the death of his father, he wrote Finnegans Wake, a novel characterized by puns and new words that was an instant success.When France was occupied by Germans he went back to Zurich, he never saw the end of WWII because he died in 1941. Joyce was influenced by the French symbolists and believed in the impersonality of the artist, the artist’s task was to represent life objectively to give readers a faithful image of it. This necessarily led to the isolation and detachment of the artist from society since his works don’t express his point of view. His style, his technique and his language developed from the realism and the disciplined prose of Dubliners, a language that breaks down into a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical connections, in infinite puns, where reality it becomes the place of psychological projections, symbolic archetypes and cultural knowledge. DUBLINERS pag 375,376 STRUCTURE AND SETTING: It’s made up of 15 short stories that deal with human situations and moments of intensity. The first stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin, the others concern the middle years of characters and their social, political or religious affairs. Joyce ,being a modernist novelist , was hostile to city life because it degraded its citizens; in fact Dublin is represented as a place characterized by cruelty and selfishness. The stories are dived into 4 groups: Childhood ,Adolescence, Maturity, Public Life. The last story”the dead” act as an epilogue, it summarizes themes and motifs of the other stories. CHARACTERS: Joyce represent the Dubliners as afflicted and desperate people who, even if they want to escape they cannot because they are spiritually weak, an example is the young lady in “Eveline” who instead of a new life in Buenos Aires decided to stay in Dublin.