and thought that momentarily divides or unites our souls. Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being like this . Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpest of steel ... life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit ...? Woolf stated that the fiction writer s central concern is with character, the mysteries of the human personality.Woolf denied the necessity of the plastic development of plots and characters. To approach the experience of life, to reveal the inner lives of her characters and to criticize the social system of the day she often employed the stream-of-consciousness < span align = "justify"> technique in her novels. Although she did not invent this technique, she refined and brightened by her own wit and observation the procedure by which the characters of a novel reveal themselves through their unspoken thoughts. Her method was to assemble in language of great poetic force tiny fragments of perception. She tried, as far as possible, to catch each moment as it passed rather than to thrust her characters into the contrivances of a plot.Woolf had been subject to nervous breakdowns and depression since childhood. When World War II came, she became terrified of relapsing into madness, and at the age of fifty-nine in March of 1941, during a depression following the publication of her last novel The Years, she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Ouse River . After her death, it became fashionable to emphasize her faults as a writer - her inability to create exciting plots or to draw strong, distinctive characters - at the expense of her virtues. Today she is again discovered as a rare spirit who, in her own delicate fashion has enlarged our knowledge of the human heart.
James Joyce
1882-1941Joyce was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, the eldest of the ten surviving children. His family was relatively well-to-do. His father sent Joyce at the early age of six to the finest preparatory school in Ireland, the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College. Soon his father John Joyce lost his previous job and was unable to keep the boy at Clongowes Wood. The boy was removed from that school and sent for two years to a mediocre Christian Brothers school in Dublin. Later he was admitted without fees to Belvedere College where he showed himself as a successful schoolboy. Years of unholy mysteries of sex which he experienced at Dublin s red-light district and the sacred mysteries of his training at Belvedere were followed by some months of piety, fasting, and prayer. Joyce seriously contemplated entering the priesthood.1898 Joyce graduated from Belvedere and entered University College, Dublin, the Catholic university which competed with the more prestigious Protestant institution, Trinity College. His former life satisfaction was replaced now by academic success and recognition. His literary idol was Henrik Ibsen whose Work was thought to be scandalous at the turn of the century. Joyce attacked the narrowness and provincialism of the Irish intellectuals and nationalists and looked toward Europe as a scene of greater vision and freedom. In 1902 Joyce took his degree and was ready for search for his own vision and freedom abroad. He travelled to Paris to begin studying medicine but quickly dropped out for want of money. He lingered in Paris for a while writing reviews for the Dublin Daily Express and teaching English to private pupils. His mother was seriously ill and Joyce came back home. In 1904, after his mother s death, he took a post teaching at a school in a Dublin suburb.June of 1904, Joyce met and fell in love with a young woman, Nora Barnacle, tall, pretty, but nearly uneducated and having no interest in literature. She was not the girl one would have expected to become the consort of a great master of modern letters, but her understanding and uncritical acceptance of him was perhaps just what Joyce needed. In September 1904 the couple set out for the Continent. Since then Joyce had Joyce had made only two brief trips to Ireland. After brief stays in Poland and in Rome, Joyce took up language teaching at the Berlitz School in Trieste, where he and Nora lived until 1915, and where their two children were born. Not until 1931 were Joyce and Nora legally married. Joyce was a brilliant linguist who for many years earned his livi...
