Joyce's Dubliners Research Articles

An Eco-linguistic Analysis of Urban Landscape and Social Critique in James Joyce's Dubliners

The main objective of this research is to revisit Stibbe (2015) framework of Eco-linguistics where he believes that it analyses language to reveal the stories we live by, judges those stories from an ecological perspective, resists damaging stories and contributes to the search for new stories to live by. This study examines James Joyce's Dubliners through an eco-linguistic perspective, focusing on the interplay between language, environment, and social critique. The detailed descriptions of Dublin's urban landscape and ecological symbols reflect the characters' inner lives and critique early 20th-century social conditions. The analysis draws on theoretical contributions from eco -linguistics and environmental criticism, emphasizing the use of linguistic landscapes and ecological metaphors to convey themes of stagnation, aspiration, and interconnectedness. By immersing the reader in the physical and social environments of Dublin, Joyce's language deepens empathy for the characters and enhances understanding of broader socio-environmental issues.

Translating Gendered Paralysis in Dubliners: A Reflective Retranslation of James Joyce's ‘A Painful Case’ through a Feminist Translation Approach

ABSTRACT While current Chinese translations of James Joyce's Dubliners are acclaimed, demonstrating a commendable effort to make this classic of English language world literature accessible to Chinese readers, the book's depiction of the way femininity, masculinity and broader society in early twentieth century Ireland are ‘paralysed’ could be further emphasised for young Chinese readers through specific translation strategies. This exegetical paper offers a reflective analysis based on a comparison between our feminist retranslation of one of the short stories in Dubliners, ‘A Painful Case’, and two of its existing translations. In doing so, this essay aims to demonstrate how specific translation strategies can encourage a more critical gender and cultural consciousness in a younger generation of Chinese readers, and sheds light on the benefits of applying feminist translation methods to the retranslation of a classic naturalistic short story by a male writer. This article also makes a fresh and distinctive contribution to the scholarship of Chinese studies of Joyce and the translation of his work, through the lens of gender and culture.

Musical Allusions in James Joyce's Dubliners and the Problem of Their Translation

Abstract: The importance of music in the works of James Joyce has long been acknowledged by Joycean scholars, though few systematic attempts have been made to deal with musical allusions. A tenor singer in his youth, Joyce fills his writings with musical references and allusions used for certain purposes in his own style. No matter how music is applied, one thing is certain - musical allusions always add a further dimension to his stories, provide a deeper understanding to a piece of literature making it unique and revealing the unknown. Translation of allusive texts has always been of great interest to linguists, professional translators and literary critics. It requires some strategic and problem-solving competence, as well as cross-cultural awareness, as allusions are closely interconnected with the cultural SL content.

The Illusion in James Joyce's Araby

Araby is a story from James Joyce's Dubliners. Illusion is an important theme of Araby as it concerns the boy's painful insight into reality and his transition from childhood to adulthood.

The Borrowed Dreams of Dubliners

Dreams have a history of being read as texts; but how should we read texts when they purport to dream? Here I think about oneiric moments in Dubliners defined broadly—nightmares, ecstasies, reverie. The idea is that when Joyce's Dubliners wander away in their minds, they enter books beyond their own: a kind of literary unconscious that contaminates the diegetic plane. If true, this challenges a tendency to read Dubliners as compositionally distinct from Joyce's later works, confirming (as others have suggested before) that the author's propensity for purloinment and forgery was a continual preoccupation, though one with fluctuating visibility and varying methods of formal acknowledgment.

Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry ed. by Lise Jaillant

Reviewed by: Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry ed. by Lise Jaillant Tamara Radak (bio) PUBLISHING MODERNIST FICTION AND POETRY, edited by Lise Jaillant. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 288 pp. $104.00 cloth and ebook. In 2014, Oldcastle Books published a never-before-seen paperback edition of Joyce's Dubliners.1 Rather than being based on newly discovered archival material, this edition is part of the publisher's "Pulp! The Classics" series, featuring a Reservoir Dog-type cover that shows famous Dubliners such as Brendan Gleeson, Paul Muldoon, and Colin Farrell sporting black suits and wearing sunglasses; the blurb reads "[l]iars, thieves, whores and priests? James Joyce sure knew how to throw a party!" While this edition did not have quite the same lasting impact on Joycean scholarship as other versions of the author's texts (the "Joyce Wars" need hardly be reiterated here), the uniqueness of its setup draws attention to publishing choices such as cover, layout, and typography, as well as to marketing and target audiences, which are often overlooked or marginalized in analyses of modernist literature.2 Indeed, as the editor of this book, Lise Jaillant, notes, "studying publishers has long seemed a distraction from the real business of literary studies" despite the fact that "the paratext is almost as important as the text itself" (1). We readers tend to see novels as finished artifacts, as printed and bound books. Unless we are dealing with texts that self-reflexively foreground their printing process (such as the increasingly intrusive "[s]llt"s in "Aeolus"3) or employ metafiction on a large scale (such as Finnegans Wake4), jolting us out of our willing suspension of disbelief, we tend not to think about a literary text primarily as a material object. [End Page 460] And yet, as Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry convincingly shows, a publisher's choices regarding seemingly inconsequential matters such as typography were crucial for establishing and developing a modernist aesthetic in literary publishing. A case in point was the publisher Faber & Faber (known to Joyceans as "Feebler and Fumbler"5). As John Xiros Cooper notes in the chapter "Bringing Modernism to the Market: The Case of Faber & Faber," Geoffrey Faber and the new employees he hired—among them T. S. Eliot—aimed for "a more modern look" that was opposed to the "typographical traditionalis[m]" displayed by the Gwyers, Faber's former partners at Faber & Gwyer (95). As Cooper notes, "Faber wanted to change the culture of the firm. He wanted to experiment with design, presentation and marketing" (94), which was an important step towards a modernist sense of print publishing. Each chapter focuses on one publisher, outlining that firm's marketing strategies and publishing choices, as well as the challenges its staff members were often faced with as a result of their pioneering role.6 While each essay portrays a single press, the individual chapters are interconnected in intriguing ways without creating a sense of redundancy, but rather recreating the new-found sense of connectivity and cosmopolitanism associated with modernism and its time. While enjoying behind-the-scene views of the inner workings of publishing houses, we also learn more about the people behind them. A particularly interesting case in this regard is the American Broadway producer Crosby Gaige, who published fine books and limited editions by contemporary authors. Gaige recognized Joyce's significance for the modernist literary market, yet "admitted that he did not think much of Joyce as a writer" (166). As Jaillant notes, Gaige was a publisher interested in the market value of modernist authors rather than their daring, paradigm-shifting experiments with form (167). In contrast, Joshua Kotin portrays Sylvia Beach as an unwavering pillar of support for Joyce through the years, believing in his vision and persevering with the publication of Ulysses despite adverse circumstances. Kotin's chapter "Shakespeare and Company: Publisher" draws attention to the personal as well as monetary cost that was involved in the process (Beach frequently jeopardized her own financial security—as well as that of Shakespeare and Company—for Joyce), noting that by the end of their collaboration, Beach eventually "felt exploited after years of serving as Joyce's everything" (131). Besides Beach...

The Way Out of Paralysis: Joyce and the Habitual Present Tense

James Joyce's Dubliners has generally been read as a critique of the paralysis of those living in Dublin. Using the lens of the Irish grammatical tense of the habitual present, however, this essay suggests that Joyce intentionally uses English grammatical modalities to approximate the Irish construct in order to imply the temporary nature of that paralysis: given enough time, most of the characters will find their way out of their particular paralysis, even if only to land in a different kind of paralysis.

Towards an Oceanic Dubliners

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.

Catholic Influence on Concepts of Death and Dying in Joyce's Writings

Catholic Influence on Concepts of Death and Dying in Joyce's Writings Michael Patrick Gillespie Although this article will look chiefly at the ways in which Joyce's experiences with religion shaped his treatment of the end of life, like most issues related to his works a full understanding can come only through consideration of a broader cultural context. Catholicism played an integral part in almost every aspect of the Irish ethos at the time that James Joyce was growing to manhood in Dublin. To catch the flavor of his world, he fills his narratives with references to all aspects of Catholic belief, and he readily draws on its prayers, liturgies, dogma, and traditions for a rich source of metaphor. With that in mind, one states the obvious in saying that any thorough study of his fiction must include attentiveness to how Joyce understood Irish Catholicism and how he represented its diverse aspects throughout his fiction. Such an analysis needs to emphasize, not conventional Catholic teachings, but Joyce's subjective impressions of them: Joyce, like any other human being, constructed his environment based on his personal understanding of everything he encountered in the world. As such, a discussion of his views on Catholicism would be markedly distinct from any objective review of the church's influence in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland. To be sure, one of the specters that has troubled countless discussions of Joyce's relationship to the church is that of positing an essentialist, reductive understanding of Catholicism. Doing so can easily construct a straw-man argument; many such arguments reflect a view that overlays personal animosity toward aspects of the church, almost as if settling old scores. As a result, one's appreciation of the Catholic culture of Joyce's fiction will not be materially enhanced by objective, social scientific efforts more fittingly employed by historians—for instance, gathering data on attendance at mass from 1880 to 1900. In fact, such information could very well mislead one's comprehension of Joyce's representations. Instead, the thoughtful literary critic must emphasize attentiveness to the subjective instincts of an artist endeavoring to capture a particular tone and perspective of a specific societal cross-section—lower middle class, Catholic, and urban—that he wishes to inculcate into his [End Page 114] writings to enhance a reader's sense of the way particular characters saw and reacted to their world. The key to such an approach is the acknowledgement of Joyce's sophisticated sense of the range of feelings informing the attitudes toward the Catholic church that were held by even the most ordinary citizens whom he depicted in his fiction. Only a few of Joyce's Dubliners, for instance, seem inclined to participate in the Devotional Revolution—the surge in public piety in the latter part of the nineteenth century effected largely through the work of Cardinal Cullen—or to submit to the ecclesiastic tyranny that sought to regulate every aspect of their lives. A clear example of the impulse to resist such efforts at control comes when Simon Dedalus, in a fit of anger during the Christmas Dinner scene in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, famously invokes what has now become the shopworn cliché characterizing the Ireland as "an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter."1 Many of Joyce's characters showed, time and again, a relationship with Catholicism, far removed from the supposed lockstep conformity to church dictates that stereotypical portrayals of Catholic Ireland present as an oversimplified donnée. In fact, many were openly antagonistic. A few sentences after the passage quoted above, Simon Dedalus brags about a grandfather, saying "he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them to put his two feet under his mahogany" (P 33).2 Examples of this of sort of energetic anticlericalism abound, often mixed with sardonic humor. One of the most forceful and amusing appears in Ulysses when Ned Lambert's recollection of a rough-and tumble clash of church and state gives a perfect sense of the offhanded undermining of episcopal...

Joyce's Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): A Postcolonial Analysis

This research paper explores James Joyce’s imagined attitudes towards the building up of an Irish cultural identity and a new Irish nation in selected short stories from Dubliners (1914) and his autobiography A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Taking our bearing from Postcolonial theory proposed by Frantz Fanon in his The Wretched of the Earth (1968), we argue that Joyce opposes the nationalism of the literary, political, cultural, religious, and linguistic discourses advocated either by the Irish Revivalist authors such as William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, John Millington Synge and others, or the Gaelic League’s aspirations to de-anglicise the Irish minds at the turn of the nineteenth century Dublin. Indeed, we demonstrate that according to Joyce the cultural and political nationalism vindicated by the Revivalists was old-fashioned and needed to be adapted to modern concerns. We also showed that he considers the Leaguers as ‘Gaelo-centric’ because of their linguistic confinement. This is why he promotes the use of an English language which is more adequate with opening Ireland for the rest of the world. What comes of this study is that Joyce plays the role of an awakener of his fellow Irish men and women and avoids falling in the traps of what Fanon (1968) calls the “pitfalls of national consciousness”.

Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald and I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories

Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald and I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories

The Value of James Joyce by Margot Norris

Reviewed by: The Value of James Joyce by Margot Norris John Whittier-Ferguson Margot Norris. The Value of James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. 157 pp. Margot Norris is always worth reading on James Joyce. Her first book, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (1976), showed me and many other aspiring Joyceans of my generation not only a way to read the Wake (and a way to use theory productively in English studies—a lesson that was to become even more important in the decade to come) but also why that reading might matter in aesthetic, sociopolitical, and psychological terms. Her more extensive, ambitious study of Joyce's oeuvre, Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism (1992), brought her formidable abilities to bear on Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses as well. Norris has remained a writer who has never let Joyce's famous difficulties obscure her arguments for the importance of his writings as works of revolutionary art that are always morally and ethically engaged. Her readings of his prose have been so compelling, her formulations of the stakes of those readings so provocative, that she has served not simply as an exegete of these challenging texts; I know from using her books and articles in my own classrooms for many years now that she is a writer whose work recruits new Joyceans to the fold. Her postmillennial projects concerning Joyce are therefore particularly fitting: she has edited a fine edition of Dubliners (2006) in the Norton Critical Editions series. She has published Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses (2011), an intriguing experiment in what we might discover if we approach Joyce as naive readers, fresh to the text and untutored (but also uncontaminated) by the shelves on shelves of criticism that threaten to obscure the blue book of Eccles. Even [End Page 390] her Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners (2003), which is pitched more to the critic than the beginning student, nevertheless keeps the classroom and readers new to Joyce in mind. Indeed, in this text as well as the 2011 Ulysses study, she employs her titular "virgin reading" approach, reading each story as though for the first time and thereby recapturing the strangeness, the surprises, the questions that we may long since have decided were answered or resolved. Her most recent contribution to the field, The Value of James Joyce, is the most hospitably open-armed of her studies to date. This brief introduction (a little over a hundred pages of text) is a thematically organized guidebook to Joyce's work, from Dubliners through Finnegans Wake. It is perfectly in keeping with Norris's enterprise over the past decade that her latest invitation to Joyceans-in-the-making opens with an introduction and first chapter concerning themselves with "Democratic and Cosmopolitan Joyce" and "The Significance of the Ordinary" in this challenging writer's prose. Emphasizing the demotic, humanistic Joyce for his "ability to fascinate both highbrow academics and ordinary readers" (1), Norris celebrates Joyce's relevance and his appeal: "his willingness to exercise a remarkable generosity in his embrace of all that is human" (2). This generosity is Norris's, too, as she offers new readers ways into Joyce that are themselves of obvious interest and importance. "The value of Joyce's work," she tells us, with characteristic lucidity and conviction at the end of her introduction, "lies in its enormous efforts to enrich our concept of the human—the aim of all art, to be sure, but achieved here in particularly broad and complicated ways" (6). In her examination of "the ordinary" in Dubliners and Portrait, Norris is not only helpful but often revelatory. For examples of the fruits of her studiously down-to-earth approach, I'd single out her descriptions of the psychological and financial intricacies that bind Corley and Lenehan together in "Two Gallants"; her discussion of what occurs in "Counterparts," which turns out "to be the tragedy of the death of the ordinary, of life when ordinariness is imploded at every turn by the drama of human needs, urges, pressures, and violence" (19); and her astute presentation of how much is mundane and daily...

Portraits in Development: James Joyce, The Artist, and the Human Condition of Creativity

Portraits in Development:James Joyce, The Artist, and the Human Condition of Creativity Noel Arthur Davies Glover (bio) Prologue: The matter of a few holes A form which he knew for his mother's appeared far down in the room, standing in the doorway. In the gloom her excited face was crimson. A voice which he remembered as his mother's, a voice of a terrified human being, called his name. The form at the piano answered: —Yes? —Do you know anything about the body?... He heard his mother's voice addressing him excitedly like the voice of a messenger in a play: —What ought I do? There's some matter coming away from the hole in Isabel's … stomach … Did you ever hear of that happening? —I don't know, he answered trying to make sense of her words, trying to say them again to himself. —Ought I send for the doctor … Did you ever hear of that?... What ought I do? [End Page 131] —I don't know … What hole? —The hole … the hole we all have … here (Joyce, Stephen Hero 147). "The hole we all have … here," says the artist's mother in James Joyce's novel Stephen Hero, the first iteration of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. What hole, then? Mother and son reckon together in the quotation above with the question of the body's matter and with the matter of the body's meaning. How to make sense of the words that make sense of the matter that comes away from the body? Isn't that already what words are: matter coming away from a hole in the body? For Joyce's artist the body's limits seem to have a constitutive relationship to limits in understanding. The artist and his mother emerge as forms in relation to the sense of their words regarding a hole we all have. They seek an account of the body, of what it is and that which it is not, its matter and the matter of its hole. In a seminar on Joyce, Jacques Lacan is also drawn to the question of the relationship to the body: "In no [hu]man is the relationship with the body a straight-forward relationship—aside from the fact that the body has a few holes" (128). "According to Freud," Lacan continues, "this is even what must surely have put [the hu]man on the path of those abstract holes that have to do with the enunciating of anything whatsoever" (128). Straightforward about the body as a relation, says Lacan, is the fact of its holes. Obscure in this relation, however, is the question of enunciating the meaning of this fact. Can we describe literature, then, as an exceptional form of the enunciation of the fact of the body's holes, a style of enunciation that is also a relationship and a filling-in, a composition of matter coming away from a lack? Is literature, in other words, and precisely, the very matter of the few holes in the body? Jacques Derrida argues: No doubt literature, too, seems to aim toward the filling of a lack (a hole) in a whole that should not itself in its essence be missing (to) itself. But literature is also the exception to everything: at once the exception in the whole, the want-ofwholeness in the whole, and the exception to everything, that which exists by itself, alone, with nothing else, in exception to all. (42) Treated together, Joyce, the artist, and his figure of the artist, Stephen, comprise a body and a body of work, a certain wholeness, and the filling-in of a hole, and yet also the exception to its own wholeness, intending toward [End Page 132] a reader, and so containing even in the enunciation of the relation to the body's holes a few additional holes. If literature is what comes away from the holes in the subject, we are left with an additional question, as Garry Leonard asks in a Lacanian re-reading of Joyce's Dubliners: "Where do the holes in the subject's story of [themselves] come from?" (31). Accordingly, I am interested...

The Modernistic Features in Joyce's Dubliners

James Joyce’s Dubliners is highly modernistic in terms of both content and form. This paper attempts to make an exploration of its modernistic themes of paralysis, loneliness, and death felt by Dubliners at the turn of a century due to religious and political plights, and to analyze Joyce’s modernistic writing techniques of epiphany, symbolism, dilution of plots, and shift of narrative perspectives, through which the characters’ spiritual subtleties and social complexities are revealed. It aims to show that these modernistic writing techniques highlight the characters’ confusion, depression, and resignation in modern Dublin, and Joyce thus presents a chaotic social panorama of Ireland.

Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue ed. by Vicki Mahaffey (review)

Reviewed by: Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue ed. by Vicki Mahaffey Brian Dillon Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue. Vicki Mahaffey, ed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012. Pp. xix + 402. $60.00 (cloth). The title of this volume refers to its critical strategy: one essay is devoted to each of the fifteen stories of James Joyce's Dubliners, with two readers responding to each story. Vicki Mahaffey, the volume's editor, co-authored the introduction and the chapters on "The Sisters" and "A Little Cloud." Twenty-eight other critics contribute. In the opening of each chapter, each pair of critics explains how they conducted their dialogue. Some wrote separately, shared their drafts, and then constructed an essay that in some cases sounds like it emerges from one unified source; other essays allow readers to feel like they are overhearing a dialogue. All fifteen essays offer valuable insights into these deceptively complex Dublin characters. The volume's title also presents a pun on the pejorative meaning of "collaborator," one that arose in 1940s France when the Vichy government was accused of selling out to the Nazis for their own gain. Joyce's characters unconsciously collaborate "with the enemy in so far as they have internalized the values of the imperial power, including the denigration of the indigenous Irish as helpless, lazy, and incapable of governing themselves" (1). Many (if not all) of these essays respond to this crucial thematic concern. As Mahaffey and Jill Shashaty assert in their introduction to the volume, "Instead of seeing their circumstances as constructed [by their own, personal choices], Joyce's characters, one after another, bow to forces they believe to be too strong for them" (3). Mahaffey and Shashaty continue: "The refrain of 'it was useless' that runs throughout Dubliners accents the hopelessness that characterizes psychic oppression—and psychic oppression is what allows political or military oppression to continue when physical violence is not actively in use" [End Page 415] (10). Yet Joyce does not depict his characters with disdain. He "treats limiting circumstances not as a punishment that the inhabitants deserve because of their inadequacies, but as a problem that can be addressed only through a demystification of the individual's unconscious complicity with the forces that limit him" (12). The reader is challenged to imagine the alternative choices that the oppressed characters could make. Many of these essays directly confront Joyce's narrative techniques, which in places conceal and reveal meaning simultaneously. Mark Osteen's take on "Araby," for example, points out that Mangan's sister speaks to the protagonist while she plays with a bracelet on her wrist. If we presume that details are not trivial, we may question whether this represents her flirtatious interest in him, or perhaps boredom with him, or that she quietly ponders the kind of decorative item that their talk of the bazaar calls to her mind. "We cannot know what Mangan's sister intends," Kathryn Conrad (Osteen's collaborator) concludes (74); her silent gesture provokes a wide range of legitimate interpretations. In a similar vein, Marilyn Reizbaum and Maud Ellmann point out that the gold coin that Corley shows to Lenehan at the end of "Two Gallants" only superficially serves as the solution to a riddle. Its sudden appearance in the story's final sentence raises many questions: "Why is Lenehan so obsessed with Corley's transaction with the slavey? Does Corley owe him money . . . ? How does the slavey acquire the gold coin? . . . Does Corley con the girl into paying him for sex, or is she 'on the turf,' with Corley running her?" Reizbaum and Ellmann ask (131-32). Indeed, is Corley blackmailing her? In the dialogue between these two geriatric adolescents, double entendre creates confusion as to whether sex or finances are under consideration; the two seem conflated. Consider the consequences of narrative technique in "Counterparts." James Hansen asks, "What precisely does Farrington, the hypermasculine, intensely aggressive, overly embodied, hard-drinking copy clerk from the ninth story of Dubliners, really want?" (200). After demonstrating his unsteady hand at work, he meets up with his mates in the pub where they encounter the Englishman Weathers, who defeats Farrington in two arm-wrestling matches. Due to Joyce...

"Famished Ghosts": Famine Memory in James Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i>

"Famished Ghosts":Famine Memory in James Joyce's Ulysses Julieann Ulin (bio) Numerous critics of James Joyce have pointed out the apparent absence of the Famine in his work. Noting that he was only one generation removed from the catastrophe, they have used this proximity to support claims that the enormity of the Famine drove many Irish writers into silence. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Terry Eagleton asks, "Where is the Famine in the literature of the Revival? Where is it in Joyce?"1 He goes on to suggest that "If the Famine stirred some to angry rhetoric, it would seem to have traumatized others into muteness. The event strains at the limit of the articulable, and is truly in this sense an Irish Auschwitz." Colm Toibin, in his Irish Famine: A Documentary, writes that the pre-modern quality of the Famine "puts [it] beyond the reach of writers who came after it; and the speed with which society transformed itself—and perhaps the arrival of the camera—made the history of 1846, 1847 and 1848 in Ireland a set of erasures rather than a set of reminders."2 While Eagleton's question has elicited several answers, these have tended to focus on Joyce's Dubliners or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and to ignore Ulysses. In his essay, "The Memories of 'The Dead,'" Kevin Whelan argues that Joyce's work, "beneath its calm surface, is pervasively disturbed by the presence of the Famine: The post-Famine condition of Ireland is the unnamed horror at the heart of Joyce's Irish darkness, the conspicuous exclusion that is saturatingly present as a palpable absence deliberately being held at bay, 'the terror of soul of a starving Irish village.'"3 Luke Gibbons has argued that in Joyce's Dublin, memory makes up a phantom public sphere that cannot be contained within the Irish home. Having been dealt a series of concussive shocks by public history and political memory, and with "no homes to go to," these energies live in the halfway houses of the pub or in the streetwalking culture [End Page 20] and exist as a somatic memory that the body carries around. Gibbons discusses this chiefly in terms of the paralysis of Joyce's Dubliners, which he links directly to the Famine: "In the eyes of many observers, the devastation wrought upon Irish society both during and after the Famine was such that the entire culture seemed reduced to the kind of enervation associated with hysteria, what became known as 'the great silence.'"4 With the exception of the first chapter of Mary Lowe-Evans's Crimes Against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control (Syracuse 1989), the Famine in Ulysses had not been considered at length at all.5 Then, in 2006, Hungry Words: Image of Famine in the Irish Canon (Irish Academic Press) offered a long overdue analysis of the Famine's iconography in writers such as Yeats, Synge, Edgeworth, and Beckett, claiming the catastrophe operated as a textual presence rather than as an absence. The volume included a chapter by Bonnie Roos entitled "The Joyce of Eating: feast, famine and the humble potato in Ulysses," which offers a succinct look at the "Nestor" episode, as well as the shriveled potato Bloom carries in his pocket. This new direction has opened a space for a comprehensive look at the Famine in Joyce's Ulysses. The Famine is present to a far greater extent in this novel than in Joyce's earlier work, emerging in iconography and the somatic memories of the characters as well as through direct reference. In his careful incorporation of popular historical accounts of the Famine as source material, Joyce crafts a text in which, far from existing as what Whelan terms an "exclusion" or a "palpable absence," the memory of the Famine operates centrally to delineate a boundary between cultural insider and outsider. In Joyce's lifetime, questions of Irish memory and history received significant attention,6 and Joyce's own evolving interest in Irish history should not be overlooked. In 1907, Thomas Kettle had criticized Joyce's Chamber Music for showing no knowledge of folk traditions. In the review, Kettle...

Look back in wonder: how the endings of short stories can be their most powerful and effective distinguishing features

Drawing on her experiences as a writer and teacher of short fiction, the author offers an interrogation of the defining qualities of short stories, with a particular focus on how the ending of a narrative can be one of the most useful ways of teasing out generic differences between short fiction and other prose forms. A survey of critical and writerly opinion leads into a practical demonstration of how endings work, with detailed reference to James Joyce's Dubliners. The essay concludes by suggesting ways in which Dubliners prefigures the composite novels and story cycles that are prominent features of contemporary practice.

Exploding the open book: The Atrocity Exhibition, Vermilion Sands and the ethics of the short story cycle

In 1989, Robert Luscher distinguished the terms 'short story sequence' and 'short story cycle'. Luscher argued that the term 'cycle', associated with texts such as Joyce's Dubliners (1914), presupposes a totality. Instead, Luscher proposed the term 'sequence' to denote collections in which the text does not arrive at a unity, but with each successive story opens and expands. The individual meanings are not subsumed within the whole but instead grow within, what Luscher calls an 'open book'. Luscher's account is a revisionary exercise that substitutes 'sequence' for 'cycle'. He does not consider their respective differences in terms of the modernist/postmodern paradigm. Instead, Luscher's use of linear and binary thinking places his critique not only on the side of modernism but also on definitions of the short story that emphasize its impressionistic and epiphanic qualities. The openness of the sequence is, in practice, far less liberated than Luscher claims. While the stories assembled to form Vermilion Sands (1971) can be described as late modernist pieces, the avant-garde design of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) effectively explodes Luscher's 'open book' by refusing to be reconciled within any meaningful structure. In so doing, Ballard calls into question the academic tendency to define the short story.

Self Enlightenment in Woolf, Joyce, and Nietzsche

In his article "Self Enlightenment in Woolf, Joyce, and Nietzsche" Gabriel V. Rupp analyzes texts drawn from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a critical period of change characterized by an explosive set of dramatic, historically unique, and complicated transformations in society and technology. Rupp argues that in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in James Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in Friedrich Nietzsche's last three "strangely beautiful but mad" letters (Kaufmann), these writers' self enlightenment of a unified and discrete self is disrupted, calling into question simultaneously the constructed nature of that unity of self while also exposing certain limits inherent in such a chaotic, polyvocal, and "schizophrenic" conception of consciousness. By applying Niels Bohr's complementarity as a potential reframing of those limits, Rupp suggests that a form of ethical subjectivity, i.e., self enlightenment, can be recovered in the texts analyzed.

“True Impossibility”: Editing Byron

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth-Coleridge Association 2008: Romantic Lives and Letters“True Impossibility”: Editing ByronJane StablerJane Stabler Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 40, Number 2-3Spring-Summer 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043446 Views: 10Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.