The book has an open ending – we don’t know Stephen will do. It ends with the decision to leave Ireland. This exile, solitude are the ways in which Stephen opposes to the oppressing influence of the society. He rejects what life suggests to him – his choice is loneliness. The problem of correlating of artists & society is solved by Joyce from highly individualistic standpoint. The last pages express Stephen’s understanding of form & time categories. “The past is consumed in the present & the present is living because it has force in the future”. The name “Dedalus” is symbolic. It is a symbol of new art which is liberated from restrain of old art… He discovers & explores the possibilities of new art. Its aim is to create a new labyrinth of forms of new art.

In 1922 ”Ulysses” was published. It started as another short story for “The Dubliners” but grew into the massive novel. Joyce recreates the action of “Odyssey” in a single day – July 16, 1904 (it was a significant day for Joyce: he decided to leave Ireland & met his future wife). Since two plains run parallel. The main characters are associated with certain people in “Odyssey” by Homer: the main characters are Stephen Dedalus & Leopold Bloom, an advertising solicitor & in a certain way an eternal Jew both figuratively & literally. Minor characters are the people whom they meet in different places. Dedalus acts as Telemachys & Leopold Bloom is modern Odyssey & his wife Molly is modern Penelope. Bloom wanders from place to place throughout this day – butcher’s shop, post office, cemetery, printing house, library, pub, hotel, again pub, shop, his poor house, cheap pub… his adventures has nothing in common with adventures of Odyssey. They are down to Earth, petty. In Bloom Joyce tried to show wandering of “eternal…”. He has unheroic adventures & finally meets Stephen who becomes his spiritual son. This is a plot.

In form the book is mostly a never-ending stream of Bloom’s consciousness (he is not an intellectual person, his impressions are very incoherent). The book has a very rigid form. Joyce describes in many details every moment of the day: actions, feelings & thoughts. But apart from it Joyce deepens into human consciousness… he tries to render something which doesn’t depend on people’s mind, he tries to penetrate into human psyche, impulses which govern, move them. Each chapter corresponds to the certain episode in Homer’s “Odyssey” & each chapter has its own style. It witnesses that Joyce was a virtuous of the English language. ”Ulysses” has 18 episodes, each of them tracing the deeds & the thoughts of three people during one day in Dublin. The book is a mosaic. It consists of different & not quite linked together parts. There is almost no plot. Joyce still puts the idea in it to describe symbolically man’s wandering in the chaos of life & floating with the stream of his thoughts. The humanity is lost & confused about all the contradictions of modern life, people waist their lives in this chaos, their existence is sensless & purposeless. The three main characters present three eternal types of human beings – common person, an artist, a woman. Bloom stands for the symbol of a typical bourgeois person. He is very limited & content with down-to-earth pleasures.

The book caused a storm of outrage. It was banned in Britain & America for more than ten years. Now it is praised for technical experimentation & stylistic brilliance. The book attracted attention to the stream of consciousness technique. In general it evoked controversial responses.

Even before completing “Ulysses” Joyce wrote “Finnegan’s Wake” – a novel. If “Ulysses” is considered to be a daybook, “Finnegan’s Wake” is a night book. Joyce tried to present the whole human history in a dream of a Dublin innkeeper Earwicker by name. The style is appropriate to a dream, the language is shifting & changing, the words blur & glue together, this suggests the merging of images in a dream. This technique enables Joyce to present history & myth as a single image. The characters stand for eternal types, identified by Earwicker himself, his wife & the three children.

The work masks the limit of formal experiment in the language. “Finnegan’s Wake” is considered to be a closed book. It is very sophisticated. Joyce loses the thread of narration sometimes… attempted in the sound of words, construction of a sentences, to render the meaning of what he was talking about (e.g. images of woman & the river are merging; the rhyth – gurgling, flowing water). What unifies these two books – both of them express Joyce’s positive credo: he asserts that life is eternal, human society does change but the change has a circular character. Everything is renewed, nothing can be destroyed. Joyce starts the work with the continuation of thoughts & the beginning of them is at the end. Man must believe in the city (symbol of Dublin).

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1889 – 1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot is considered today’s genius in poetry. Quintessence: refine sensibility – the essential quality of the poet. “Our civilization comprehends great variety & complexity; & this variety & complexity playing upon a refined sensibility must produce various & complex result. The poet must become more & more comprehensive, more & more allusive, more indirect in order to force, to dislocate if necessary language into his meaning” – said Eliot. This is an account of what a modern poet should do. He must be finely tuned to the world to be able to express the various & complex. The poet can distort the language, to use it figuratively.

Extremely was influential figure in literary circles. Editor, poet, playwright, critic – he came from a prosperous American family, his father was a rich manufacturer & his mother wrote poetry. He was brought up in St. Louis Missouri. He was educated in private school & attended Harvard to get his degree in philosophy in 1906. Then left for Paris. There he attended lectures of Henry Bergson – “Subjective Idealism Philosophy, Theory of Intuitivism”. Being in Paris he read much on French symbolist poets. The symbolist movement was one of major influences upon his poetry. The goal of art is to express the unique personal emotional responses to a certain moment in human life through indefinite illogical, sometimes private in meaning symbols. Eliot returned to Harvard & there he read widely in Sanskrit & oriental philosophy (had a powerful influence on him). In 1915 he decided to give up philosophy to remain in England & to begin writer’s career. In 1916 he completed his Ph.D. theses, but never received a degree. He married & settled in England permanently.

The beginning of his literary career starts from 1910 when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. It was published in 1915 in magazine “Poetry”. The poem is written in a very simple style. Then he made a collection “Prufrock & Other Observations”. This was compared with “Lyrical Ballads” of Wordsworth & Coleridge. This work inaugurated the age of modernism in poetry. There is no plot in the story. It’s a dramatic monologue but of the new kind. It sounds like a stream of consciousness of a person who walks up the street of London. The protagonist is Alfred Prufrock. He is an antiromantic hero, rather timid, self-centred. The tone is very ironic, images are startlingly fresh. The title suggests that some feeling should be shown to the other person. The poem starts as a dialogue: