Vita e opere di James Joyce in inglese, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Vita e opere di James Joyce in inglese e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! JAMES JOYCE Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and attended a Jesuit boarding school. His life was changed by the downfall of the politician Parnell which led to Joyce's father being dismissed from his job because of his political allegiance. Because of economic problems, James was sent to the local school but later moved to another Jesuit institution. The collapse of nationalistic aspirations and the effect this period had on the family's stability was to influence him for life. At University College in Dublin, Joyce studied English, Italian and French and read European literature. Joyce was sympathetic to nationalistic movements but found their aims too narrow minded. He believed Ireland should permit artists their freedom and reduce the power of the church over its people. He decided to leave Ireland because he did not feel accepted by literary circles. He saw exile as a way of freeing himself from Dublin which he considered a place of paralysis and repression. In 1902, he left for Paris but in 1903 he returned to Dublin to see his dying mother. In 1904, he wrote an autobiographical essay which was to become Stephen Hero, then revised into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). He also wrote poems, published in 1907 with the title Chamber Music. On 10th June 1904, Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who was to become his life-long companion and mother of his two children, Giorgio and Lucia Anna. He first walked out with her on 16th June, a day which was to become famous as the single-day setting for his Ulysses. In the same year he wrote The Sisters, the first story of Dubliners. The couple moved abroad and Joyce worked as a teacher of English first in Pola and then in Trieste where his son and daughter were born. In 1909, Joyce made friends with Ettore Schmitz (penname- Italo Svevo). Their friendship would last many years and helped Svevo's novel, La Coscienza di Zeno, to reach public notice. Joyce was frustrated by the continual rejection of Dubliners, but in 1913, Ezra Pound sent Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the review The Egoist which published it in installments. Dubliners was published in book form in England in 1914. Joyce began work on Ulysses which was first published in installments in the literary journal the Little Review. It would become a classic Modernist text, influencing future generations of writers. With the war-time evacuation of Trieste, the Joyces moved to neutral Zurich in June 1915. In 1920, the family moved to Paris where Pound continued to promote Joyce's work. There Joyce met another supporter, Sylvia Beach, the owner of the bookshop 'Shakespeare and Company’ who decided to publish Ulysses in book form in 1922. Joyce's new novel, Finnegans Wake, was published in 1939. Following France's declaration of war on Germany in 1939, the Joyces moved away from Paris back to Zurich where Joyce died on 13th January 1941. Joyce is considered the master of Naturalistic short stories and the leader of Modernism of English literature, alongside Eliot and Virginia Woolf. DUBLINERS Dubliners is a collection of 14 short stories plus a final one published in 1914. Joyce wanted to write stories about everyday life in Dublin, the characters were all from the middle class. The conception of Dubliners started when Joyce was asked to write a story for the Irishh Homestead; Joyce was in debt and he needed money, so he immediately wrote the story, named The sisters and published under the pseudonym of Stephen Dedalus. He then decided to continue writing stories of the everyday life of Dublin.This collection was supposed to be followed by Provincials, a second series that was never realised. Joyce wanted to represent the paralysis that affects all the inhabitants of Dublin,by writing about everyday life but, at the same time, he wanted the readers to be uplifted and to experience a moment of epiphany. An epiphany is a spiritual and intense moment of insight and self-understanding, when everything becomes clear to the character’s eyes. It’s caused by details, thoughts, gestures and objects that come together to produce a new sudden awareness for the character, who experiences a sort of personal revelation: it represents a turning point in their mind. For Joyce, paralysis is the condition in which men live in the Victorian age and in particular in Dublin. These people are unable to react to life situations and are forced to live unhappy lives. This is because the Victorian age in which they live is contradictory, because behind the luxury and pomp it wants to show there is an enormous economic and moral degradation. The paralysis is reinforced by the lack of action in the stories, which is caused by institutions like the Church, family and State. The stories are grouped in childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. This organisation points out another key theme which is growth and maturity. We can see the development of the characters. EVELINE Eveline is a short story taken from the second group of Joyce's most famous collection Dubliners, published in 1914. It starts in medias res and there’s no introduction. It is about Eveline, a 19-year-old girl, who is sitting in front of a window contemplating her hard life in Dublin. She appears to be stuck in an unhappy life, where her father is very abusive towards her and her siblings. She’s torn between staying and keeping her promise to her dead mother to keep the family together, and leaving with her boyfriend for a better life. The story slowly leads to her moment of epiphany when she realises that she doesn't want to end up like her mother, so she decides to leave with Frank. But once they get to the port and they’re about to get on the boat, Eveline is unable to leave and is paralysed by her condition. Joyce sees this failure to change as an example of the paralysis that affects Dublin and its inhabitants. The narrative follows Eveline's thoughts as she remembers the past and contemplates the future. THE DEAD The protagonists of the story are Gabriel Conroy and his wife. The story starts with them going to a Christmas party hosted by Gabriel’s aunts, Julia and Kate. Gabriel meets several people, among whom an irritating woman, who accuses him of being a “West Briton” and from that moment the party turns into a disaster. Towards the end of the party, Gretta (the wife) hears a song that reminds her of a young boy who loved her when she was 17 years old. After the party they come back to their room in a hotel. Gabriel feels a strong physical passion towards the wife, but she’s mentally distant from him. She’s in fact thinking about that young man and when she falls asleep, he watches her with pity. Gabriel has an epiphany in which he realises his wife’s regret and he understands that he is not who he wants to be. He’s shocked and surprised that there was something of such significance in his wife's life that he never knew about. He then thinks about the role of the countless dead in living people's lives, and observes that everyone he knows, himself