OSCAR WILDE, JOSEPH CONRAD, JAMES JOICE - Vita, caratteristiche stilistiche principali, opere principali

OSCAR WILDE, JOSEPH CONRAD, JAMES JOICE

Vita, caratteristiche stilistiche principali, opere principali

OSCAR WILDE: was Irish, he born in 1856 into an upper middle-class family. He attended Portora Royal School, Trinity College and then he won a scholarship to Oxford University where he took an honour degree in classics. He declared himself a disciple of aestheticism, whose slogan was "art for art's sake", a socialist and an antagonist of prevailing moral and religious code. At Oxford he lived as a Dandy, he creates the image of eccentricity; he dressed extravagantly and paid great attention the elegance of his lodgings. His conversation was brilliant and full of memorable witticisms. He believed that in life as in art, the artist's duty was to cultivate beauty and give aesthetic pleasure. He had a tour in America, he settled in London and he married Costance-Lloid. He turned from poetry to prose and he achieved success in a range of genres: essays, fiction and drama. Especially successful was The picture of Dorian Grey, a short novel combining Gothicism with Aestheticism. It tells the story of a fallen dandy who corrupts all the people who fall under his spell, murders the friend who acts as the voice of Dorian's conscience and finally punishes himself by committing suicide. Other prose productions were: The Carterville ghost, The happy prince and other tales, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime. He also wrote four very successful plays: The importance of being earnest, an ideal husband, Lady Windermere's Fan, A woman of no importance. In 1895 came the public shame of his trial for homosexuality and subsequent imprisonment; in prison he wrote an epistle, De Profundis to Lord Douglas. Wilde openly criticises society for meanness, bigotry and unfairness in its treatment of him. His imprisonment inspired his last poem, The Ballad of Reading Goal, where the criminal is identified with all sufferings humanity and regarded in a spirit of forgiveness. After prison he was unable to stand social humiliation and he moved to Paris where we died in poverty and alone. For a long time Wilde was considered a minor figure whose art was overshadowed by his life, now his reputation has been more thoroughly assessed on the basis of his artistic merit. Lady Windermere's Fan: the Duchess of Berwick visiting Lady Windermere to tell her that her husband is having an affair with Mrs Erlynne. Her language sound quite artificial, she uses stereotyped adjectives to express he sympathy or antipathy, and lots of exclamations. In her speech there are also several instances of verbal humour based on exaggerated remarks, incongruous sentences and juxtaposition of trivial and serious object. She is a comic flat character, a caricature of snobbish aristocracy. /

JOSEPH CONRAD: was born in 1857, in the Russian dominated Ukraine. He has a long-standing passion to go to the sea. So he joined the French and also the British Merchant Navy. He sailed all over the world, mainly in the Far East, which was the setting of many of his stories and novels. In 1895 he retired from the sea, settled in England and devotes himself to writing. He died in 1924. His first novel published is Almery's Folly. Other good productions are Lord Jim, Youth, Nostromo, the Shadow line. His novels were not popular, his first success come towards the end of his career, in 1913, with Chance. Conrad life at sea provided him with much of the subject matter of his fiction which often deals with adventures in exotic countries. These, far from being romantic, are usually ordeals in which a character has to grapple both with hostile external forces and his own inner nature. In Heart of Darkness, during his journey up the Congo, Marlow has to face difficulties connected with the wild nature of the environment and the hostility of the withe and the black people he meets which put his moral strength and self control to the test. At the end he is not fighting the wilderness outside but rather the spell that Kurtz's personality has cast over him. The title of the novel refers then both to Africa, the dark continent, and to the darkness of human heart. This novel has been considered an enquiry into the nature and a denunciation of European colonialism in Africa. In the light of psychoanalytic reading, Heart of Darkness can also be interpreted as a journey into the unconscious. The journey upriver into the heart of Africa represent a voyage backwards into the savage, primeval state of man that eventually civilization has succeeded in repressing and keeping under control by means of moral restraint. At the end of his life Kurtz is presented as the shade of his original self, he still shows his powerful personality in his torment caused by two contrasting feelings: diabolic love and unearthly hate for the mysteries he had penetrated in his life in the forest. The narrator does not reveal what is monstrous passions are and uses a highly metaphorical language to hint at Kurtz's secret which is sealed by Kurtz final cry: the horror! Kurt's abominable debasement is unspeakable rite interpreted by critics in two ways: Kurt has either sunk to cannibalism or he allowed human sacrifices to be offered up to him by the natives. The terrible unknown force in man's psyche is reflected also in the African landscape. The use of personification and figurative language in the description emphasises the terrible uneasiness the narrator feels in the presence of that force whose "inscrutable intention" he cannot figure out but whose spell he strongly feels. Conrad wrote it in what was for him his third language, after Polish and French, yet it is as rich as any native novelist's in vocabulary, imagery, and sensuous detail. In the creation of atmosphere through the suggestive use of language he has few equals. Conrad's narrative technique was very original; it was influenced by Henry James's preoccupation with the working of human mind. In hearth of darkness he uses two first person narrators, one to introduce the story and the other to tell the story and comment on it. With this device Conrad attempts to solve the problem of representing the subjective matter of human consciousness and also distancing the reader from it. /

JAMES JOYCE: he was born in Dublin in 1882 and educated at Jesuit schools. The themes of betrayal and the temporary nature of fame influenced the young Joyce deeply. They are reflected in his choice of anti-heroes as protagonists and in his rejection of the stifling atmosphere of Dublin. He did not sympathize with the nationalist movement which gathered strength after Parnell (one of the leading supporters of Home Rule for Ireland). Although he loved Ireland he saw patriotism as a backward movement which paralysed the development of a free spirit in Ireland. He become a religious sceptic but was never hostile to the Church. He left Dublin in 1904 and left his family behind but he kept his sense of family bonds. He had a close relationship with his brother Stanislaus. Abroad he lives first in Trieste and Rome where he had to give private lesson to support his family. Some of his important productions are Dubliners, A Portrait of the artist as a young man. During the war he moved to Zurich where he underwent the first of many eye operations to prevent him from blindness. Ulysses comes out in 1919 but the publication was stopped because it was found obscene. When he moved to Paris he was a celebrity. He died in 1941. As a young student Joyce was an enthusiastic admirer of Walter Pater, the theorician of aestheticism. It was from aestheticism that he derived his interest in form which is central to his approach to novel writing. For him literature was a means to promote awareness, maintained that art should be independent of other disciplines and of any moral aim. For him the artist had lost his commanding role in art, his task was to make people aware of reality through their own subjective perception. The form he sought was one making a literary work as impersonal as possible. The writer had to provide all the separate elements of the picture that would enable the readers to reach their own conclusions. The formal aspect of fiction was therefore very important for him. Particularly important was the problem of the point of view. In order to ensure that his works carried no messages from himself, he adopted different points of view, different narrative techniques (third p. narration, stream of consciousness: the mind flux of thought. In modernist fiction it is anarrative technique that convey all the proceeding of a characters mind based on the association of ideas) and different linguistic style. In this way he hoped to solve the problem of how to present the fragmented, multi-faceted nature of reality and of how to convey the subjective dimension of experience. Part of his works often reminds one of the Cubist attempt to show a simultaneous vision of the world. Perhaps Joyce's most remarkable ability was his linguistic resourcefulness. He was able to render in writing the rhythm, tone and pitch of a variety of speaking voices. The central themes in his works are: youth, adolescence, adulthood and maturity, and how to identify is affected by these different stages in life. All his books have an autobiographical dimension. Eveline: exemplifies well both Joyce's use of form and theme. She is a frustrated young woman, facing the first challenge of adulthood. She dreams of escaping from her drab life, but at the crucial moment she is powerless to act. Her defeat does not stem from a direct confrontation with her father authority but from an inner struggle with herself which wipes out the adult personality she was trying to establish. Third person narration that proceed entirely from eveline's pint of view. Ulysses: the extract in the book exemplifies the work's parallelism with the Odyssey. It contrasts the episode of Nausicaa's capacity to see beyond appearance and her coming into womanhood with Gerty's projection of her romantic fantasies on to reality. It also exemplifies the varieties of style Joyce employed for different point of view and different subject matter. He shifts from third-person narration at the beginning to interior monologue. The language at the beginning is rich in onomatopoeic words, baby and colloquial language to add realism and vividness to the scene, while in the second the style is that of woman magazines and suggest the dream world in which Gerty lives when she sees herself as the heroine of popular romantic fiction.