Dublin James Joyce Journal: Number 3 (2010)

Irish Studies Review, 2021

James Joyce Quarterly, 2015

Irish Studies Review, 2013

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,

2013

vii the compactness 9 of the stories, indeed the microscopic character of Joyce's microcosm, where 'everyone knows everyone else' (D, p.49) in the small cage represented by the city: Mr Kernan in 'Grace' knows Crofton of 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room', as Lenehan of 'Two Gallants' knows Holohan of 'A Mother', and the names of the streets in 'After the Race' are repeated in the story of 'Two Gallants'. Even the priest's house in 'Araby' reminds us of the house in which the priest of 'The Sisters' lived: 'the former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. [...] He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sisters' (D, p.19). By following Joyce's Dubliners' trajectory, we could recreate our mental map of the Dubliners' traces. By doing so, we enter houses, churches, pubs, offices, cakeshops, railway stations, and walk down blind and narrow streets together with the characters of the stories, and in the meanwhile the public space of the city emerges. 10 Joyce's Dublin is quite timeless and static. However, characters' movements are characterized by both moments of stasis and action, lack of orientation and arrest; their direction can also be eastward-such as in the first three stories of 'The Sisters', 'An Encounter' and 'Araby'or westward, as for example 'The Dead', or even the movement can be from the outside to the inside-as in 'After the Race' or vice versa, as in 'Eveline'. Sometimes the Dubliners' direction lacks of time and orientation: they walk round and round the same streets for hours as in the story of 'Two Gallants', or as the horse in Gabriel's story in 'The Dead'. But even though the traces are irregular and the stories apparently different in places and facts, Dublin joins the fifteen stories together as a kind of huge manacle. Given the fact that Joyce is principally an urban novelist, Dubliners is a perfect example of his obsession for accuracy in his depiction of his native Dublin. However, he conducted his 'topographical symphony' 11 from abroad: his books were in fact written during his voluntary exile in continental cities-Zurich, Trieste and Paris 12from which he contemplated Dublin through three different 'lenses'. An apparent paradox central to his work is that whilst fleeing from the 'nets' of State, Church and family in Ireland, these are the very themes that animate his writings from his short stories Dubliners, his autobiographical Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Rethinking Joyce's Dubliners, 2017

factors of popular culture, such as the rise of minor newspapers and publications of the early-twentieth century, and an uncanny but enlightening comparison between Joyce and Eugene

James Joyce Quarterly, 2017

The specters that haunt James Joyce's texts are not indicative of nostalgic excursions into the past. Rather, writes Luke Gibbons in

Proceedings of 11 th International Research Conference on Education, Language and Literature, 2021

Abstract The image of the city acquires special prominence in Modernist literature. The urban cityscapes simultaneously serve as real geographical areas and universal symbols in works of great modernist authors. This is especially true about James Joyce’s Dublin - the permanent setting of the works by the great Irish modernist. A collection of short stories “Dubliners” belongs to the early period of James Joyce’s creativity and its title highlights the importance of Dublin for the collection- the capital of Ireland is not a mere setting, but the unifying factor, the main image of the collection. Joyce represents the capital city as the centre of paralysis, or hemiplegia, affecting its citizens, despite their age. The paper discusses the importance and symbolic meaning of the city in the text. Joyce manifests naturalistic precision while mapping his city. The meandering of the characters around the streets of Dublin acquires symbolic importance - circular routs and the characters’ futile attempts of breaking the circle demonstrate the inability of Dubliners to escape the paralysis of their physical, cultural, religious existence. I try to explore the role of Dublin in shaping the fates of its citizens and the methods, used by Joyce to depict the main city of Ireland, which is just “wearing the mask of capital,” remaining deeply provincial in every aspect of its existence. Key Words: Dublin, paralysis, capital, chronotope, inability