JAMES JOYCE (1882-l941)

Like other European writers of the time he was interested in all aspects of modern culture, including Freudian psychoanalysis and the experimentation that was affecting all field of art. Infect the second period of Joyce 's writing sees the transition from traditional approach to the stage of experimentation ,as a result of this experimentation he created "Ulysses" regarded a Joyce's masterpiece was published in 1922. Ulysses is an immense, complex work but original for its theme and its modes of expression, it deal with a single day, June 16,1904 in the life of three Dubliners, two men and one women, and it is divided into three part.

-The central character in the first part is Stephen Dedalus .S is a young man with intellectual ambition, the enemy of his own country and a martyr.

- His Christian name Stephen is that of the first Christian martyr. His surname, Dedalus, is that of the legendary Greek artificer: Stephen desires to convert the philistine Irish to the cult of beauty inherited from the Greek. He represents Ulysses son, Telemachus.

-The second part of Ulysses is dominated by the ure of Leopold Bloom, the Ulysses of the title. A middle ages Jewish man, who wanders around Dublin as Ulysses wandered around the Mediterranean, encountering adventures, which parallel those of the Homeric hero.

-His wife Molly Bloom, who corresponds to Ulysses' wife Penelope, dominates the third part.

The novel begins with S evicted and forced to wander the streets in search of father and home. In his wandering he meets Bloom who adopts him and give him a shelter, at home is Molly like Penelope in Ithaca. The book concludes with her ruminations (Molly's monologue).

Parallel with Homeric Odyssey

-There are 18 books in all, each one corresponding to one of the episodes in the Odyssey

-In the O Telemachus forced to share his home it his mother's suitors, who maltreat him. Discontented he seeks for news of his father. In U Stephen is showing living in a tower on the Irish coasts with companions who mock him and evict from his home

-In the O Nestor is wise king who gives T many good advices; in U the counterpart of Nestor is Mr. Deasy, the teacher of T

-The Homeric story of Ulysses' sailors turned into swine (porci); Joyce's parallel is visit to a brothel (bordello) by S and together

-The last chapter called Penelope representing the goal (meta) of the wandering of Bloom and Stephen. Safe at home, Bloom is in bed asleep besides his wife, who reflects on her past and present.

The technique Joyce adopt to represent her thought is the stream of consciousness method, which represents the natural disordered of thought and feelings, uncensored by rational control, as free association of ideas. The time is no more objective category, but relative one and therefore there is often the contemporarity of past, present and future. The best example of the stream of consciousness is in 'Ulysses' the monologue of Molly Bloom. It's an illogical speech, which is based on the association of different thoughts or impressions, through similarity of sound or meaning. In particular she passes from the image of flowers to her youth in Gibraltar, to Leopold's proposal and to God's existence In Molly's monologue J use the stream of consciousness method, in particular the interior monologue (S.C. refers to the mental activity itself, while I.M. is the instrument used to translate this phenomenon into words) while Molly dreams, his thoughts wander then he focused the attention on the sun which remembers the memory of her first kiss with his husband his first sexual rapport with his husband, his perfume, the pulsation of his heart, the final inn to the life and his sensuality.

Joyce creates new kind of language, a mixture of existing words, inventive words and non-existent words with disordered syntax, without punctuation, puns or any logical order, without limit of time or space.

He called the moment of insight 'epiphany". The original meaning of the term 'Epiphany' is, of course, the showing of the Christ child to the Magi: But Joyce adopts this expression to signify a sudden revelation, the moment in a novel or story when a sudden spiritual awakening is experienced in which all the petty details, thoughts, gestures, objects, feeling, etc., come together to produce a new sudden awareness. In other words, there is an epiphany when details, or moments, buried for years in one's memory, suddenly surface in one's mind and, like old photos, start a long, often painful mental labour.

Joyce thought that the artist ought to be invisible in his work, in the sense that he must not express his own viewpoint. He should instead try to express the thoughts and experience of other men. He advocated the total objectivity of the artist and his independence from all moral, religious or political pressures.