James Joyce

•1882 – He was born in Dublin from a lower middle-class Irish Catholic family
• He studied Italian, French and English at University College, Dublin. In 1903 he left Ireland to study
medicine in Paris. He returned to Dublin a few months later when his mother fell ill.
In 1904 He met Nora Barnacle, whom he later married, and moved with her to Trieste (then part of
Austria-Hungary) to teach at the Berlitz Institute where he worked on Dubliners and on A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Manand he met and befriended Italo Svevo. In 1905 and 1907 his son Giorgio
and daughter Lucia were born.
1914→ First World War, he moved to Zurich where he worked on Ulysses and met the American poet
Ezra Pound. He then moved to Paris and worked on Finnegan’s Wake. When in 1940 German troops
occupied Paris he returned to Zurich, where he died the following year.
Main works
Dubliners 1915; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1916 (semi-autobiographical novel whose
protagonist Stephen Dedalus rejects his family, religion and native land to seek freedom); Ulysses
1922; Finnegans Wake 1939 (Joyce’s last work, a complex, experimental novel)
Joyce and Dublin
He spent most of his adult life in Europe (Trieste, Paris, Zurich) but set all his major works in his
home town of Dublin but he saw himself as a European rather than as an Irishman.
He rebelled against the Catholic Church and showed little interest in the revival of Irish Celtic identity
and the struggle for independence.
Dubliners
(written between 1904 and 1907 but not published until 1914.) Joyce describes his intention of writing
“a chapter of the moral history of my country”. He chose Dublin because the city seemed to him to be
the ‘CENTRE OF PARALYSIS’. Fifteen stories presented chronologically, showing four aspects of
the lives of Dubliners:
• CHILDHOOD: The Sisters – An Encounter – Araby
• ADOLESCENCE: Eveline – After the Race – The Gallants – The Boarding House
• MATURITY: A Little Cloud – Counterparts – Clay – A Painful Case
• PUBLIC LIFE: Ivy Day in the Committee Room – A Mother – Grace – The Dead
Style
• Joyce uses the real language of Dublin at the turn of the century, individual tone and use of slang
represent the different characters.
• Joyce provides precise geographical details (street names, buildings) of the setting for each story.
• The first three stories use first-person narrators, the twelve following use a third-person narrator,the
narrator generally has knowledge of just one character’s thoughts – ‘LIMITED OMNISCIENCE’.
• ‘FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE’ – the narrator echoes the thoughts and expressive style of a
particular character.
Themes
• Dublin as a STATIC provincial town, sense of FAILURE of characters, condition of inaction or
‘PARALYSIS’ (physical and spiritual) which afflicts the people of Dublin, characters fail to change
their lives. EPIPHANY, “a sudden spiritual manifestation”: moment when the characters become
aware of their condition of paralysis.
Ulysses
First published in parts in the American journal The Little Review from 1918 to 1920. Published as a
complete novel in Paris, on 2nd February 1922, Joyce’s 40th birthday. Ulysses is hailed as the great
masterpiece of modernist literature. Object of critical scrutiny and discussion. Subjected to a trial for
obscenity in the USA. The novel follows the appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom, on one
day (16th June 1904) in and around Dublin.
Structure
• Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Greek epic the Odyssey.
• The novel is structured in 18 episodes which correspond roughly to the 24 episodes of the Odyssey.
The text does not include the episode titles, which Joyce prepared as an explanatory outline which he
sent to friends. STEPHEN DEDALUS (protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
represents a young man in search of maturity and an alienated artist, he stands for Telemachus and is
briefly ‘adopted’ by Leopold Bloom.
LEOPOLD BLOOM is a Jewish advertising salesman, he represents common man/humanity and is
the parody of the wandering Ulysses of the Odyssey. MOLLY BLOOM, Leopold’s unfaithful wife is
an opera singer, ‘exotic’ and sensual (Irish military father and Spanish mother) ironically paralleled
with Penelope.
Setting and plot
Set in and near Dublin on one single day – 16th June 1904. The plot is simply a chronological
narration of the actions of three characters:
• PART 1 (episodes 1-3) – The Telemachiad – features Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus).
• PART 2 (episodes 4-15)– The Odyssey – based on the day of Leopold Bloom (Odysseus/Ulysses), a
Jewish advertising salesman.
• PART 3 (episodes 16-18) – Nostos – Leopold returns to his loving but unfaithful wife, Molly
(Penelope)
Style and themes
• VARIETY OF STYLES imitating styles of different periods of English literature, many details,
extensive use of the STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS technique and DIRECT INTERIOR
MONOLOGUE. Full of puns, parodies, invented words and humour.Love and sexuality experienced
as sordid realities – decay and corruption of modern civilization, apparently unstructured and chaotic.
no restoration of order and justice. Joyce makes massive use of the technique of Stream of
Consciousness expressed through the adoption of the direct interior monologue, uncontrolled
first-person narrative with no control by the author, limited use of punctuation, reflects the chaotic
working of the mind of the protagonist(s), Bloom’s thoughts, ideas, memories flow freely with no
logical organisation.
-T.S. Eliot considered the parallelism between the two works as the novelty of Joyce’s work and
labelled it the “mythical method”.
It is “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama
of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.
Virginia Woolf
1882 – Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, She was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen,
important Victorian literary figure (essayist and editor) and Julia Jackson, a beautiful aristocratic
woman. She was educated at home, surrounded by artists and writers and she did not go to university.
During her youth she lived in St Ives in Cornwall in 1895 the death of her mother led to a first mental
breakdown. In1900 she was encouraged by her father to begin her career as a writer. 1904 the death of
her father led to another mental breakdown. She moved to Bloomsbury where she founded the
Bloomsbury Group, a group of intellectuals and artists. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf with
whom she founded the Hogarth Press (1917). In 1941 she committed suicide.
Main works:
The Voyage Out 1915, her first novel. traditional narrative but contains hints of Woolf’s future themes
and narrative technique.; Jacob’s Room 1922 experimental novel, Jacob is a lonely young man who
studies the Classics and travels to Greece, but is incapable of coping with modern reality; Mrs
Dalloway 1925; To the Lighthouse 1927
Feminist works: A Room of One's Own (1929), non-fiction, long essay, important work of feminist
literary criticism, written following two lectures Woolf delivered on "Women and Fiction" at
Cambridge University Woolf examines the social, educational and financial difficulties women have
faced over the centuries. Three Guineas (1938)
Modernist writer
Pioneer of the use of Stream of Consciousness as a narrative device, highly experimental novels, plots
of little significance – uneventful. Abundant use of visual and auditory impressions. Focus on
characters’ psychology and consciousness. Flexible handling of time – dilated ‘subjective’ time and
condensed ‘objective’ (chronological) time.
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
The action takes place on a single day in a single place (London). Subjective time – past, present and
future flow together in Clarissa’s mind → Stream of Consciousness; time as an indication of the
inevitable journey towards death; the passing of objective time marked out clearly by Big Ben which
strikes every half hour.
PLOT
• The middle-aged Mrs Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party she will give in the evening.The
narration follows her thoughts and actions as she wanders through London over the course of the day.
• Mrs Dalloway’s counterpart is Septimus Smith – a shell-shocked veteran of the war, Septimus too
wanders through London but on a voyage towards self-destruction. The novel ends with Septimus’
suicide. News of his death reaches Clarissa while she is at the party.
CLARISSA DALLOWAY
• Middle-aged, conservative woman, defined by her role as wife of a conservative MP (Mrs) and
mother perceived as a limitation to her freedom, unable to express her feelings freely. obsessed with
past memories. Torn between the desire to celebrate life and to carry out her public, social role and her
own feelings and “morbid attraction towards death”
SEPTIMUS WARREN SMITH
• Veteran of the war, ‘shell-shocked’ – tormented by panic attacks and terrible hallucinations based on
his war experiences, he’s attracted to the idea of death as a form of liberation. He was committed to a
psychiatric hospital. Takes his life by jumping out of a window at the hospital.
Main themes:
Life, social oppression, death and the ghost of war
Constant haunting presence of war in memories and visions→Criticism of war – seen in the physical
and mental destruction of Septimus→ his suicide frees him from the burden of an absurd life
Failure of society to understand and handle mental illness
• No traditional plot
• Fragmented, disconnected actions
• Focus on the coherence of the mind – impressions, ideas, feelings, memories
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
• ‘Indirect interior monologue’
• Woolf shows her characters’ thoughts using an omniscient impersonal 3rd person narrator.
• Prose is controlled, syntactically and grammatically correct.
To the Lighthouse (1927)
The action takes place on the remote Isle of Skye in the Hebrides. The novel is divided into three
parts: The Window – One day in summer 1910 Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children spend
their summer in their summer home on the Isle of Skye. They have a number of guests, including the
young painter Lily Briscoe. The youngest son, James, wishes to visit the lighthouse across the bay. Mr
Ramsay tells him they can’t because the weather is likely to be bad.
Time passes-time passes quickly and many years are condensed in very few pages. The First World
War breaks out, Mrs Ramsay dies, Andrew Ramsay, the eldest of the children, is killed in battle, Prue
Ramsay dies in childbirth,The Ramsays’ house is abandoned.
The Lighthouse – One day in 1920 the Ramsays return to their summer home on Skye. Mr Ramsay
decides that it is time for them to visit the lighthouse. Lily Briscoe completes the painting that she had
left unfinished ten years earlier.
Style
Unusual, external omniscient author. Narrative experimentation and psychological insight. Importance
given to the inner reality of the characters, indirect interior monologue; shifting perspectives through
each character’s consciousness.
‘Modernist’ use of time: the first part dilates subjective time over one day; second part objective
(chronological) time encompasses a time- span of years.
Characters
MRS RAMSAY central character, centre of the family, fully accepts her female role, affectionate
wife, loving mother; perfect hostess. remains in memory as a constant presence after her death.
MR RAMSAY prominent philosopher anxious about his work, loves his family but is often harsh and
selfish, in need of constant affection and support
JAMES RAMSAY youngest of the Ramsay children, he’s six years old at the start of the novel; loves
his mother – resents his father
LILY BRISCOE single, young painter, uncertain of her talent. Charles Tansley, another guest, states
that women can neither write nor paint. she begins a portrait of Mrs Ramsay which she completes in
the final part.
The novel centres on a series of contrasts/dichotomies and symbols.
contrast between:
• male and female;life and death; light and darkness;inner and outer world.
Symbols the Lighthouse
• something longed for but never acquired; an illuminating presence; source of light and inspiration.
T.S. Eliot
LIFE
1888 – He was born in St Louis, Missouri into a middle-class family. From 1906 to 1909 he studied at
Harvard University.1910-1911 – He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris→Influenced by the
work of the French Symbolists, he then returned to Harvard.In 1914 he moved to England, worked in
London as a teacher and in Lloyds Bank. In 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge
governess. He befriended the American critic and poet Ezra Pound who helped him publish his work.
In 1925 he went to work for a famous publisher, Faber and Faber.1927 – He became an Anglican and
a British citizen. In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and he died in London in 1965.
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10,
1948→speech:
[...] While language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry
belonging to another language, is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongs, an understanding
we can get in no other way. [...] And I take the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, when it is given to a poet, to be
primarily an assertion of the supra-national value of poetry. To make that affirmation, it is necessary from time to time to
designate a poet: and I stand before you, not on my own merits, but as a symbol, for a time, of the significance of poetry.
«Humility is also the characteristic which you, Mr. Eliot, have come to regard as man’s virtue. “The only wisdom we can
hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility” [...] you came to Europe in your youth and were there confronted with the
pre-war type of civilization in the Old World [...] This contact was a shock to you, the expression of which you brought to
perfection in The Waste Land, in which the confusion and vulgarity of the civilization became the object of your scathing
criticism. But beneath that criticism there lay profound and painful disillusionment, and out of this disillusionment there
grew forth a feeling of sympathy, and out of that sympathy was born a growing urge to rescue from the ruins of the
confusion the fragments from which order and stability might be restored. The position you have long held in modern
literature provokes a comparison with that occupied by Sigmund Freud, a quarter of a century earlier, within the field of
psychic medicine. If a comparison might be permitted, the novelty of the therapy which he introduced with psychoanalysis
would match the revolutionary form in which you have clothed your message. [...] You, Mr. Eliot, are of the opposite
opinion. For you the salvation of man lies in the preservation of the cultural tradition, which, in our more mature years, lives
with greater vigour within us than does primitiveness, and which we must preserve if chaos is to be avoided. Tradition is not
a dead load which we drag along with us, and which in our youthful desire for freedom we seek to throw off. It is the soil in
which the seeds of coming harvests are to be sown, and from which future harvests will be garnered. As a poet you have, Mr.
Eliot, for decades, exercised a greater influence on your contemporaries and younger fellow writers than perhaps anyone else
of our time.»
Main works
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), Eliot’s first published work; considered the first
masterpiece of modernism in English literature; it examines the torments of modern man.
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Eliot’s first published collection; it traces the sickness of
postwar civilization to the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence.
The Waste Land (1922), Eliot’s great modernist masterpiece; The Hollow Men (1925), a reflection on
the sad state of European culture after the First World War; The Journey of the Magi (1927), a poem
that retells the story of the biblical Magi (we “hear” their voice); Ash Wednesday (1930), a long poem
about the struggle of a person who didn’t have faith and acquires it; Four Quartets (1943), a set of four
poems written over six years before and during the Second World War.
The Cocktail Party (1949) upper-middle-class English families, their crisis, commitment to Christian
values
He wrote seven plays, including: The Rock (1934) and Murder in the Cathedral (1935) – a verse
drama recounting the murder of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.
The Waste Land (1922)expresses the poet’s disenchantment, disillusionment and disgust with the
period after World War I; complex, erudite and allusive;Eliot adds notes and references to explain
many quotations and allusions. expresses the hopelessness and confusion of purpose in the modern
city. The Waste Land is composed of five parts, each with a different title and theme:
Part 1 – The Burial of the Dead, presents a series of juxtapositions: life and death; fertility
and sterility; hope and despair.
Part 2 – A Game of Chess, theme of sterility of modern life in contrast with the
splendour of the past.
Part 3 – The Fire Sermon, theme of love, presented as mere, fruitless sexual desire.
Part 4 – Death by Water, describes the decomposition of a drowned sailor in the
sea – theme of modern sterility.
Part 5 – What the Thunder Said, theme of the spiritual journey of humanity through the desert of
modernity. Riferimenti a Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales), Bible (The Book of Ezekiel), Dante
(Inferno) Baudelaire (Preface to «TheFlowers of Evil»)
THE OBJECT CORRELATIVE
Its purpose is to express a character’s emotions by showing them rather than by describing them; to
create emotion through external factors and evidence.
Example in The Waste Land: Eliot evokes the loss of roots of modern life by making explicit
reference to Dante’s Inferno (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’); Eliot transforms London
into a universal symbol of decay, spiritual death and desolation.
Form and style
rejection of any type of narrative structure; ample use of quotations from ancient and classical sources
(Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible); poem structured as a series of ‘broken images’ in which: meanings
are not clearly defined;characters are not clearly presented. use of free verse; high use of
experimentation in mixture of many different types of verse form; length of lines; use of punctuation;
varied language – different tones from solemn to colloquial.
A variety of different, apparently disconnected themes: the psychological effects of the war; the
artist’s difficulty in writing about the tragedy of war; structural fragmentation represents
fragmentation and desolation of post-war Western civilisation; nihilistic view: sterile, arid land;
humanity is almost dead; life is paralysed; future is dangerously uncertain.
Constant juxtaposition of CONTEMPORARY WORLD and world of CLASSICAL MYTHS: The
myth of the Holy Grail – symbol of man’s spiritual quest for salvation; The myth of the Fisher King,
legendary king whose sexual impotence casts a spell over his land → rites of fertility celebrated in the
ancient world→Ancient myths add a layer of spirituality and wisdom to the squalid reality of the
modern world.
—
Modern age sul libro!!