The “Broken Chalice”: Stasis, Sterility and Death in The Dubliners (original) (raw)
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This paper tries to analyze James Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of short stories, with a special reference to "The Dead", by exploring the reflections of Irish Nationalism in it. This apparent complex work of linguistic experiment bring with it more conscious and deeper spirit of nationalism, for Joyce often wrestled with the concept of "authentic Irishness". These stories were written when Irish nationalism was enraged in its drive for a new, independent identity, and Dubliners was first published in 1914, the year that brought the First World War and the greatest material and spiritual crisis that Europe had ever faced. Moreover, it depicts an Irish society which is trying to come to terms with its own historical crises. Dubliners become the melting pot of different crisis, and find a complex formation of related ideologies: aesthetic, political, and religious. James Joyce's "realistic sketches" of Dublin clearly demonstrate the "paraly...
ADULT PROTAGONISTS IN JAMES JOYCE’S “DUBLINERS” (p. 251-253)
IRCEELT-2016 Proceedings , 2016
Joyce termed the collection of short stories “Dubliners” as a “chapter of Dublin’s moral history”. The collection is subdivided into four main branches: childhood, youth, adulthood, and social cycles. The third cycle is a matter of our focal interest. It consists of four stories: “A Little Cloud”, “Counterparts”, “Clay” and “A Painful Case”. Despite the age, gender, and social differences, all protagonists have the unifying traits - their inability to change their life or environment, fear of freedom. They are captivated by a deadly routine that drains life out of them and leads to ‘paralysis’, which is the natural state of Dublin. This cycle is the most tragic part of the “Dubliners”, as after the first feeble and futile attempt of releasing themselves from the deadly influence of Dublin, the young protagonists of the previous cycle join the humble and mute majority and turn into the grim protagonists of the adult cycle, who have to face the outcomes of their cowardice and indecisiveness in the period of youth and resort to violence and alcohol as the means of escape from reality. The ‘paralysis’ of the key characters in the collection of short stories is emphasized by means of numerous artistic devices. Joyce refers to such symbols as colours associated with death and decay: yellow, grey, brown - the weather, which is usually drab, gloomy and rainy, constant darkness, and the lack of bright colours; the symbol of the circle - despite its positive connotation in general, as a form of harmony, in this collection, the circle denotes enslavement, deadlock, and constant repetition of the monotonous routine which lives no way out. Keywords: Dublin, paralysis, indecisive, freedom, violence, routine
The Necropolis of Love: James Joyce’s Dubliners
Neohelicon 35/1 (2008): 157-69
Joyce's Dubliners (1916) embodies a harsh critique of the society in the Irish capital that is paralysed by Catholicism, by the English imperialism, by enormous poverty and social wretchedness. Love is under these circumstances degenerated and perverted, partly due to the Christian criminalization of sensual love, partly due to the egoistical and ruthless battle for survival of the individual in the capitalistic bourgeoisie. The repression of love, which is brought about through the miserable social conditions and the Christian persecution of sexuality, results in a degradation of love life, according to Joyce, that is clearly illustrated by the extensive prostitution in the streets, which the author perceives to be a direct consequence of the religious condemnation of erotic love. It is everyone for himself in this modern metropolis, so it is not only women who exercise mercantilist calculations in love life, since men utilise love in the exploitation of others as well (cf. 'Two Gallants'). Joyce reveals furthermore how one of society's most honoured institutions of love, matrimony, is nothing but state institutionalised prostitution that ties the married couple to life in mutual bitterness and unhappiness. The impossibility of love and the grim hopelessness of the socio-ideological conditions are in this manner mirroring each other in Dubliners. If the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly.
2014
This dissertation examines how the modern Irish novel negotiates shifting cultural conceptions of death and dying across the twentieth century. Analyzing a cross-section of important novels — James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room, Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, John McGahern’s The Barracks and Anne Enright’s The Gathering — my study will argue that the Irish novel has long grappled with the meaning of life and death in a world where religious and secular conceptions of the nature of life and death have continually intersected and conflictually coexisted. Though sometimes viewed as a wholly secular form, the novel in the Irish context has struggled to reconcile Catholic views of life and death that stress the importance of a “good death” and the rewards of eternity with secular worldviews that stress the importance of personal fulfillment in this life and that see death as a final and absolute ending. The novel genre may be secular in its general tendency, but it is also...
An Analysis of Themes and Language of the Characters in James Joyce's 'Dubliners
2021
The involvement of politics and colonization is a key element in Irish literature, and James Joyce's <em>Dubliners</em> is no exception. In his literary works, James Joyce blames British Empire and Roman Catholic Church as the main factors for Dublin's backwardness and inferiority (Bulson, 2006). This was the main reason that Joyce was frustrated and decided to write his short stories collection "Dubliners". <em>Dubliners </em>is a collection of 15 short stories written by James Joyce and published in 1914. Joyce believed that these literary works would make the Irish society reflect more about themselves. The entire collection of the stories revolves around the everyday lives of ordinary people in Dublin. In this collection, throughout each story, Joyce expresses disappointment, darkness and paralysis. Therefore, it reflects an intellectual paralysis of the modern society that came as a result of oppression, religion and politics. Joyce'...
In his essay "Subjugation," James Joyce writes, "Rights when violated, institutions set at nought, privileges disregarded, all these, not as shibboleths and war-cries, but as deep-seated thorough realities, will happily always call forth, not in foolish romantic madness nor for passionate destruction, but with unyielding firmness of resistance, the energies and sympathies of men to protect them and defend them." 1 In this and many other of his early writings, Joyce evaluates Ireland's relationship to neighboring island Britain as a member of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often criticizing the presumed aggressive hubris of Britain in its economic and political domination over Ireland, but also lamenting the static and paralyzed nature of the Irish in their attempt to assert themselves as a nation-state independent from British and Catholic cultural hegemony over the country. While he does not spare Ireland from a stinging criticism of its inability to resist oppression and to define and rule itself, he exposes the actual experience of paralysis in the face of foreign rule, allowing the Irish experience of subjugation to be known to the rest of the world. What Joyce's fiction exposes most clearly is the traumatic and paralyzing nature of Irish life, as his characters come to startling and disturbing realizations of their lack of agency, of the impossibility of controlling one's own fate or destiny under foreign rule.
In Search of Cultural and Personal Experience behind woman in James Joyce’s Dubliners
Artes Humanae
Artes Humanae ■ 1/2016 ■ artykuły an individual's choice and use of words reflects his/her subjective experience and idiosyncratic assessment of reality. Our lexical material comprises the lexical item woman in James Joyce's Dubliners, the attempt being to show how the senses of woman in the collection are related to the writer's private life-story and his own vision of the Irish culture and society as regards gender issues at the turn of 19 th and 20 th centuries 2. On the methodological plane, our position is that the senses of a word are not just extensions of one another, but, rather, they all constitute clusters based on "family resemblance" 3. As there is no generally established, or agreed, rule on the basis of which we can predict conventionalized meanings of a lexical item, it seems that the senses are culturally defined and have to be learned, rather than can be predicted. Even within one culture, the meaning of a word is by no means the same in all minds. Still, it is possible to find experiential and dictionary-based way of tracing semantic histories of words. On methodological and practical inadequacies of the latter, see additionally Łozowski (2015). 2 We attempt this specifically in our contextual analysis below. Yet, a few words of generalization might prove useful here. Gleed (2011: 51-52) points out that having spent in Ireland his first 22 years of life, James Joyce left not only his own country but also abandoned his Roman Catholic religion, choosing "self-imposed exile" in Continental Europe. In the words of Bulson (2006: 21), "Joyce was born and raised in the nineteenth-century Ireland, but he matured in twentieth-century Europe." Although in many European countries this was the period of great changes as regards gender roles, Ireland's development concerning this issue was considerably postponed to the result that old Victorian values were preserved there much longer. Irish women at the turn of the 20th century were severely abused with no rights to defend themselves. To conform to societal norms, they had to be obedient, devoted to family life and religion, passionless, and submissive towards men (
Joyce, Ireland, Britain (review)
Modernism Modernity, 2008
H istory has proven to be less a nightmare than a boon for Joyceans in recent years. Though critics have acknowledged the historical significance of Joyce's texts at least since T. S. Eliot first noted that Ulysses made sense of the "immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history," 1 the last twenty years or so have seen the development of a decisive historicist trend in Joyce studies. For Andrew Gibson and Len Platt, however, important studies of Joyce and history by scholars like Robert Spoo and James Fairhall remained frustratingly theoretical and for that reason missed the "Joycean lesson of specificity" (6). 2 The essays in this volume are meant to overcome this tendency toward abstraction by employing a form of historical analysis the editors call the "London method" (17). Though they confess that, aside from themselves, there is no "London school," they describe "a certain set of intellectual and scholarly habits that feature in the work that London Joyceans tend specifically to do" (17). These habits cohere as a more or less materialist method in which "the relation of theory to history and text" is altered (18). The practitioners of this method do not claim to offer an "accessible, final truth" (19). Indeed, they are interested primarily in the "possibility of establishing certain limits to interpretation" (19). What this generally means is a greater emphasis on the particulars of historical context, though as some of the essays demonstrate, discussions of historical abstractions are not excluded. For example, Finn Fordham's genetic approach to Finnegans Wake uncovers Joyce's "ironization of universal history" and his "critique of how universalization appeared in flawed attempts to justify imperialist policy" (199). In Fordham's view, the "[t]ranshistoricism" of Joyce's texts is precisely the effect of a continuity between particularities across time (202). This is not Hegelian totalization but a kind of "[t]ransepochal pattern hunting" that results in a "mockery of universalization" (203, 209). The London school appears to have learned the lessons of Michel Foucault, for while it "aims at exactitude," it is also "attentive to the possibility of historical discontinuities, ruptures, breaks" (19). Just as often, though, Joyce's texts give evidence of surprising historical continuities and connections, as is evident in Wim Van Mierlo's essay, which argues that "Joyce's high notions of exile" were part of a long history of emigration in Ireland, from voyaging saints like St. Brendan to the "heyday of the Celtic Tiger" (180, 195). In this context,