Virginia Woolf and James Joyce: Literary Icons and their Influential Works, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Virginia Woolf and James Joyce: Literary Icons and their Influential Works e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VIRGINIA WOOLF  Her father Leslie Stephen was an eminent Victorian man of letters.   She grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere with free access to her father’s library.    Childhood experiences of Death (The death of her mother when she was 13) and sexual abuse (Her stepbrothers) led to depression.  In 1904 she moved to Bloomsbury and with her sister Vanessa Bell, she became a member of the Bloomsbury Group 🡪 the avant-garde of early 20th-century London. Developed the stream of consciousness style. Post-Impressionist painting of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Pacifist philosophical theories of Bertrand Russell. Contempt for traditional morality and Victorian respectability, a rejection of artistic convention and a disdain for bourgeois sexual codes.  In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf.  In 1915 she started her literary career as a talented novelist, essayist and critic.  The Second World War increased her anxiety and fears. After rewriting drafts of her suicide note, she put rocks into her pockets and drowned herself in the River Ouse. 2. Literary career -The Voyage Out (1915) Traditional narratives. -Night and Day (1919) Traditional narratives. -Jacob’s Room  (1922) Narrative experimentation with the novel. -Mrs Dalloway (1925) A more completely developed stream-of- consciousness technique. A feminist writer 🡺 the themes of androgyny, women and writing. -Mrs Dalloway (1925) Describes Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton’s relationship as young women. -Orlando (1928) Deals with androgyny. -A Room of One’s Own (1929) Shows Woolf’s concern with the questions of women’s subjugation and the relationship between women and writing. A modernist novelist  Main aim 🡺 to give voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory.    The human personality 🡺 a continuous shift of impressions and emotions.     Narrator 🡺 disappearance of the omniscient narrator.    Point of view 🡺 shifted inside the characters’ minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas, momentary impression presented as a continuous flux.  4. Stream-of-consciousness vs traditional technique Stream-of-consciousness technique The action or plot is revealed through the mental processes of the character. Character development is achieved through revelation of extremely personal thoughts. The action of the plot moves back and forth through present time to memories of past events and dreams of the future. Dramatic monologue and free association. Traditional technique …through the commentary of an omniscient narrator. …through dialogue or the narrator’s description. …corresponds to real, chronological time. Narration, description, dialogue and commentary by the narrator. Mrs Dalloway (1925)  The main character, Clarissa Dalloway, is a wealthy London hostess. She spends her day preparing for her evening party. She recalls her life before World War I, before her marriage to Richard Dalloway, and her relationship with Peter Walsh.  Septimus Smith is a shell-shocked veteran, one of the first Englishmen to enlist in the war. He is married to Lucrezia, an Italian woman.  The climax is Clarissa’s party: it gathers all the people Clarissa thinks about during the day. It is at the party that Dr Bradshaw, the nerve specialist, speaks about Septimus’s suicide. SETTINGS  Set on a single ordinary day in June.  It follows the protagonist through a very small area of London.  The characters enjoy the sights and sounds of London, its parks, its changing life.  Through what Woolf defined as the ‘tunnelling technique’, she allows the reader to experience the characters’ recollection of their past sense of their background and personal history.  CHARACTERS MRS DALLOWAY She is 51. The wife of a Conservative MP, Richard Dalloway, who has conventional views on politics and women’s rights.  She experienced: - the influence of a possessive father; -the frustration of a genuine love, the need to refuse Peter Walsh, a man who would force her to share everything. Joyce’s early fiction is Naturalist in style Naturalism is an extension of Realism, evolutionary and deterministic theories lie at its base The fictional world is described with detachment and scientific objectivity People’s lives seem conditioned by the environment and by fate DUBLINERS “Dubliners” is a collection of fifteen short stories, published in 1922 It is the most accessible of Joyce’s literary works and revolves around Irish life at the beginning of the twentieth century The stories concern episodes of everyday life, private and public; the conversion of the everyday into art would uplift their readers Each story would witness a brief moment of self-understanding of the main character, their epiphany. Lack of action at this crucial moment would confirm their paralysis of will ‘My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country, and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis’. The stories reflect the ambivalent attitude and contradictory feelings Joyce always had towards Ireland The collection contains14 stories which fit into a clear structure The final and fifteenth story, “The Dead”, closes the collection but stands outside this main structure The stories are grouped into those regarding childhood, adolescence, mature life and public life It is a story of adolescence It centres on a nineteen-year-old who has the chance to make a new start away from her hard life in Dublin The greater part of the story deals with her thoughts, fears and indecision as she looks back on her life and forward to her new one, far away from Ireland She considers her life with her father and her younger siblings, her job, her mother and the promise she made to her as she died She also thinks about her boyfriend Frank and the kind of life she might have with him Although she reaches a moment of self-understanding and seems to be on the point of escaping… She ultimately suffers the paralysis of will which is typical of the characters in “Dubliners” Joyce saw this failure to change and rebel as a psychological straightjacket: Family, Church and Society in Ireland Modernism At the beginning of the twentieth century, many writers fell under the influence of psychologists like Freud and Jung, anthropologists like Frazer, theories regarding the role of myth in society, and the philosopher Nietzsche Old systems of support such as religion and shared beliefs crumbled. The idea of an objective reality failed. Novelists and poets attempted to express this new, subjective reality in their works New techniques were invented to represent inner life and subjective reality Past, present and future would co-exist Plot would be reduced to a minimum and be replaced by a series of impressions or moments of being Language and the act of writing became of central importance Interior Monologue The flow of a character’s thoughts are represented on the page with no interference Free direct thought from a first person, interior point of view In its extreme form, stream of consciousness, logic, coherence, syntactic and graphic impositions disappear to leave a series of impressions, sensations, memories in free association Author and narrator are suppressed The Mythical Method Once the traditional narrative method associated with novel-writing has been abandoned as ineffective, control, order and structure must be found elsewhere Joyce and other writers turned to myth to create a kind of scaffolding to give “shape and significance” to their works T.S. Eliot referred to this new method as the “mythical method” ULYSSES Ulysses – Introduction Joyce’s masterpiece is the classic Modernist text and has had immense influence on novel writing ever since it was first published It deals with the events of a single day, from 8am to 2am Most of the action takes place within the thoughts of the principal characters as they walk around Dublin Ulysses and Homer The novel draws its structure from myth: Homer’s “Odyssey” Parallels are created between the two works by analogy and antithesis In the “Odyssey”, Odysseus is undertakes a heroic journey as he seeks to return home, and his wanderings are reflected in Leopold Bloom’s wanderings around Dublin and his finally reaching his house. The 18 episodes of “Ulysses” correspond loosely to episodes in the “Odyssey” Characters The three principal characters in “Ulysses” provide further parallels with the “Odyssey” Leopold Bloom is Odysseus himself, his wife Molly is Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus While the characters of the “Odyssey” are heroic and larger than life, those in Ulysses are Introspective and ordinary. Ulysses – The Language Joyce’s aim in writing the novel was to reproduce the random and chaotic thought processes that constantly occupy our minds These thought processes are often incoherent as we leave them halfway through, pile part-thoughts on part-thoughts and freely associate ideas Joyce invents words, refers to classical texts and employs both arcane vocabulary and the speech of the uneducated in the Dublin streets Molly Bloom’s Monologue The most revolutionary episode of the novel is Molly’s monologue, a long and rambling series of thoughts It consists of 4,391 words, with only two punctuation marks It begins and ends with the word “yes”, the final affirmative closing a circle of thoughts Joyce’s Words Joyce invented a large number of words, many of them onomatopoeic He called one of his notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and words that came to him, scribbledehobble He also made the noun ‘sausage’ into a verb and opened the way for future writers to experiment with language