Joyce Critical Background

Joyce Critical Background

1. Necessity to create a new Irish Society

   • Critic of Irish society parlisis
     • Rebellion against a tradition of fear and obedience (Church, family, nation, small community's pressure)
   • Need to embrace European consciousness of liberty and artistic awareness

2. How to achieve artistic awareness

   • Myths
     • Dedalus, Icarus, Ulysses
   • Beauty
     • Words, images, idealized women as aestehtic icons
   • Creativity
     • Transforming experiences into epiphanies

3. Joyce vs Yeats

   • Similarities
     • Rejection of part of the Irish society
     • Rejection of cultural tradition of opposition and fight
   • Differences
     • Joyce looks for models oustide Ireland
     • Joyce anti-nationalist position and nationalist ideas based on Irish past
     • Joyce in favor of modernization of Irish culture creating a new Irish myth through synthesis and openness

4. Joyce and Modern English Fiction

   • He breaks with certain assumptions about the novel
     • The world, things and self are not knowable
     • language not a reliable instrument
     • The author's story not related to meaning and moral of the writing
     • Structure of the novel: not traditional beginning, middle and ending
     • Reality not ann objective fact but something perceived
     • Highlithed interior life (stream of consciousness, interior monologue, free indirect speech)

5. Modernism

   • Literary and artistic movement reacting to modernity
     • Industrial revolution, capitalism, science technology caused a loss in the faith of bigger narratives of Western societies and culture (God, political institutions, family...)
   • Values
     • Subjective perception
     • Artistic experience
   • Themes
     • Rebellion
     • Fragmentation
     • Alienation
     • Subejctivity
     • Extremity
     • Irrational
   • Stylistic devices
     • Multiple perspectives
     • Fragmented voice (sentences and images)
     • Analytic approach to reality
     • Focus on the creative process
     • Linguistic ambiguity
     • New narrative voice and relation to the reader
       • Sream of consciousness
       • Free indirect style (between omniscient narrator and character's voice)