Essential notes eliciting similarities and differences about the two authors

1. Virginia Woolf vs
James Joyce
Similarities and differences

2. Similarities
• Both of them were Modernist writers
shaping their own tongue to convey new
emotions and states of mind
• Alienation, folly, despair, a passive attitude
seem to prevail in their characters' lives
• A sort of loneliness all characters seem to
be destined despite their social contacts

3. Similarities
• Time dilation: chronological time doesn't
correspond to internal time, use of
flashbacks
• Plots lose their relevance in fiction
• Both of the writers start from realism but
as well they go beyond it to achieve a sort
of psychological realism
•

4. Similarities
• The narrator is always limited with an
internal perspective of the characters' mind
• Stream of consciousness technique
• A sort of detachment seems to prevail

5. Similarities
• A sense of doom seems to prevail
• A peculiar use of symbols to capture the
reader and engage him/her in multiple
interpretations
• Experimental narrative technique

6. Differences

7. • Joyce's narrative technique is more
experimental than the one used by V. Woolf
who maintains a sort of logical order
• V. Woolf's characters never acquire a myth
dimension as the ones by Joyce in Ulysses
• The religious torment which characterizes
Joyce's characters, the moral conflict is not
so visible in the ones by V. Woolf

8. • V. Woolf's characters belong to the upper
class whereas the ones by Joyce are middle
or low class deeply connected to Dublin
• Paralysis and escape as themes seem to
prevail in Joyce whereas in Woolf a larger
stock of themes is portrayed as feminism,
ambiguity, war, neurosis.
• Joyce's characters seem fixed in their
perspective of the outer world
experience epiphanies

9. • Joyce's characters are more victims of
themselves rather than of outer
circumstances, even despite their
epiphanies
• Most
characters by V. Woolf try a way to
react to the outer conditions by adaptation
• Moments of being are a sort of revelation
which help characters cope with reality

10. • Joyce's characters are more victims of
themselves rather than of outer
circumstances, even despite their
epiphanies
• Most
characters by V. Woolf try a way to
react to the outer conditions by adaptation
• Moments of being are a sort of revelation
which help characters cope with reality