Scarica Influence of Freud, Bergson, & James on Modernist Lit: Study of Dubliners & Ulysses e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Stream of consciousness Its main aim was to render the free flux of thoughts of the characters on the page without any intervention of the author. It was achieved through a series of devices such as the fragmentation of the character's perspective, the breaking of syntactic and grammar rules, and the overlapping of past and present events, Influenced by 1 the theories of Sigmund Freud and the revaluation of the role of the unconscious; * 2 the theorisation of the difference between objective (or chronological) and subjective (or psychological ) time made by the French philosopher Henri Bergson; ** 3 a new conception of human consciousness as described by the American philosopher William James; 4 the sense of anxiety and loss caused by the experience of the First World War. * Freud's theory, proposed the revolutionary idea that human consciousness is a multi- layered entity and that most of it is unknown. This 'mysterious' part of the mind is called 'the unconscious': it cannot be explained or described in rational terms. The 'stream of consciousness' technique can be seen as a technical attempt made by Modernist writers to use words to describe the new concept of the modern 'self' as described by Freud. **Henri Bergson, revolutionised the concept of time itself by introducing the revolutionary idea that time is structured not as a series of discrete units, but as a constant flow. Difference between chronological time and psychological time. -Chronological time is external, linear and measured in terms of the spatial distance travelled by a pendulum or the hands of a clock -Psychological time is internal, subjective and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment. James describe it like a “river” ora a “stream”. By saying subjective life is not a chain or a train, James affirms that it cannot be organised in a rational way and cannot be described objectively. direct interior monologue or indirect interior monologue, which differ from each other because they use a different kind of narrator. -Direct interior monologue: presents the thoughts of a character in a direct, uncontrolled and non-filtered way. Expressed using the 1st person point of view and punctuation is abolished. -Indirect interior monologue: shows the workings of the mind of a character using a 3rd person omniscient narrator, who controls the character's flux of thoughts and uses grammar rules and punctuation to organise them in a logical way. The narrator uses verbs like 'he/she thought' to introduce the characters' thoughts. DUBLINERS Is a collection of 15 short stories written in 1900 and published in 1914. The stories revolve around the lives of 15 typical inhabitants of the city of Dublin and represent an ideal portrait of the Irish capital at the beginning of the 20th century. The stories can be divided into three main groups. -The first three stories theme of childhood and there is a strong sense or disillusionment and failure. -Second group dealing with adulthood: Eveline belongs to this sub-section, which includes issues such as man's impossibility to escape from suffering, the passivity of Irish people and the paralysis of their will. -The last group of stories portrays the relationship between Irish individuals and collective institutions, such as politics, the musical world and the Church. Also these stories develop the concept of paralysis in private and public life. The last story of the collection is meaningfully entitled The Dead. It is a portrait of the Irish middle class, stuck in a condition of mediocrity. Protagonist live his life like a dead person. Dublin is a rather statistic and provincial town, which does not have the cosmopolitan atmosphere of many European capitals. This affects the lives of its inhabitants, represented as being imprisoned in a city that does not give them the chance to grow. What unites the characters in Dubliners is the common nature of failure they experience. All the characters have the desire to arrive at their ambition, but they have to surrender because they don’t have the will to transform their desire into action. This universal condition of inaction affects all the inhabitants of Dublin and is defined by Joyce as 'paralysis'. Paralysis is not just a physical condition: it is a spiritual stagnation of the self, a universal lack of growth that affects the whole Irish nation. In other words, it means spiritual and physical death. In Joyce's stories Dublin becomes the prototype of the paralysed city of modernity. One potential way to escape from the paralysis is ‘epiphany’. The word epiphany means 'revelation' and 'manifestation'. Joyce uses it to refer to the moments in which the characters of Dubliners experience the sudden revelation of their condition of paralysis. Unfortunately this revelation does not lead to a real change in their lives: it simply makes them more aware of how dead and paralysed they are. 1. It is not a traditional narration but the author introduce the character in media res, the reader is put into Eveline thought while is reading 2. The general collocation is static and there is a general idea of paralysis since the very beginning of the story
