James Joyce

Joyces conception of artist

The artist should be invisible in his works. He must not express his own view point and he should try to express thoughts and experiences of others men. He advocated the total objectivity from all moral, religious and political pressures.

Literary production
His literary production can be split in 2 periods: The first one is marked by a realistic technique, the plot is quite linear, the syntax is logical and the language is taken from the everyday speech. The most important work of this period is Dubliners (a collection of 15 short stories published in 1914) In Dubliners we find a particular technique: THE EPIPHANY Joyce adopted this expression to signify a sudden revelation of an inner reality. There is an epiphany when moments buried for ages surface in ones mind and start a long and often painful mental labor. The second one is marked by experimentation, is rich in symbolism and allegory. Themes and settings are the same of the first period, what changes is the language which rejects logical sequences and conventional syntax. The best known work of this period is Ulysses.

T. S. Eliot
The themes:
Modern mens alienation from society. The problem of faith in modern civilization Present is inferior to past The moral, spiritual and sentimental emptiness of our time

The symbolism
STERILITY NATURAL the land is dry, rocky, polluted and unfruitful SOCIAL people find difficult to communicate with each other and are unable to love SPIRITUAL people no longer believe in religious values Only rain , love and faith will save our waste land

The method
He used the MITHYCAL METHOD : He considered the past meaningful and important. Modern life is characterized by emptiness and sterility so he goes back to the past to find myths, legends and values.

The structure
There is no plot, only a sequence of images, unconnected and open various interpretations. There are 6 languages including Sanskrit and quotes by 35 writers. There are 5 sections: they revolve around the same vision of a nightmarish world inhabited by people that are spiritually dead.

The common theme which links the different parts of the waste land is the decay and the fragmentation of western spirituality and culture. He advocated the complete objective impersonality of the artist He asserted that poetry must communicate something even before being understood first of all through its rhythm and musicality; we can enjoy a poem even if we do not understand the language in which it is written.

Objective correlative
He expressed the need to convey an emotion without a direct statement ,but indirectly. His emotions must be represented through something (landscapes, people.) so that the reader may correlate it or them with particular emotions. The poet should not use his poems as a context in which to make confessions.

The waste land

The waste land is considered the most important poem of the 20 century. It represents the first phase in Eliots career which may be called nihilistic. The poet sees only ruins and desolation around him and is concerned with aspects of the decay of western culture. The fragmentation of the poemis the spiritual sterility of moderb life,the death of Western culture.
th