Abstract
Oceanic Studies sheds a compelling new light on James Joyce's Dubliners. Although they are citizens of a major imperial port city living amidst a global flow of goods, cultures, and ideas, Joyce's characters are n also impeded from reciprocal engagement in this circuitry. From Eveline, who stands paralyzed at the docks by the North Wall as ‘all the seas of the world tumble about her heart’, to the boys of ‘An Encounter’, who marvel at tall ships but are imprisoned by social dichotomies, to Jimmy Doyle's ill-fated efforts at cosmopolitanism on board an American yacht, to the latent Gaeltacht musings of Gabriel Conroy, a would-be European son of a Dublin Port and Docks board member, Joyce uses water to help identify a persistent desynchronization of national and global Ireland.
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