Critics

Question 1

Mr Casey

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man- James Joyce

religion

Answer 1

‘No God for Ireland!…We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!’

Question 2

Trevor L. Williams

religion

Answer 2

‘there is not a single priest who is not somehow morally and intellectually compromised’

Question 3

Trevor L. Williams

Joyce’s exile

Answer 3

‘Joyce’s self-imposed exile from Dublin was precisely a flight from the ‘net’ of church-state ideology’

Question 4

Trevor L. Williams

essay intro/conclusion

Answer 4

‘Dubliners is a gallery of human wrecks’

Question 5

Professor Walz

walking dead

Answer 5

‘At the end [of The Dead], Joyce suggests, as he had done in all the stories of public life, that people who live meaningless lives of inactivity are the real dead’

Question 6

Trevor L. Williams

paralysis

Answer 6

‘Above all, there is paralysis: linguistic, sexual, alcoholic, marital, financial; even history itself seems to have stopped’

Question 7

Lyons

alcohol

Answer 7

‘The most prevalent disease in Dubliners is alcoholism’

Question 8

Kane

Grace, Ivy Day, counterparts

alcohol

Answer 8

Gratification from alcohol is ‘illusory, temporary and destructive’

Question 9

David Lloyd

alcohol

Answer 9

Links the alcoholic excess of Counterparts to the despair of a conquered land – ‘bitterly diagnostic of the paralysis of Irish men in colonial Ireland…which is counterpointed by drinking’

Question 10

Richard Ellman

on epiphanies

epiphany

Answer 10

‘Joyce’s discovery…was that the ordinary is the extraordinary’

Question 11

Declan Kiberd

on Araby epiphany

epiphany

Answer 11

“sight has been replaced by insight or inner vision”

• • because the ‘light was out’ when the boy has his moment of realisation (inversion of traditional light symbolism)

Question 12

Garry Leonard

epiphany

Answer 12

Joyce ‘privileges the notion of an “epiphany” as the primary aesthetic building block of his stories’

Question 13

Garry Leonard

epiphany

Answer 13

‘The Joycean epiphany does not so much confirm a truth as disrupt what one had grown comfortable accepting as true’

Question 14

M. Pilar Sanchez Calle

gender

Answer 14

‘Although the portrayal of women is complex, a masculine point of view prevails throughout this work’

Question 15

Suzette Henke

on Mrs Kearney’s victimisation

gender

Answer 15

She is a ‘victim of her greed and frustration’ but also of a ‘male dominated power structure of bourgeoisie impresarios who control Dublin culture’

Question 16

Erica Gregory

gender

Answer 16

‘Joyce strives to provide a female perspective of marriage that is often lacking in the male-dominated Ireland’

Question 17

Trevor L. Williams

joyces delay of marriage

religion

Answer 17

Marriage was a ‘legal apparatus embodying for him both state power and religious oppression’ - refused to marry Nora for 27 years

Question 18

Shelia C. Conboy

gender

Answer 18

‘Dubliners shows the female body objectified and mystified by the male gaze’

Question 19

Trevor L. Williams

gender and religion ?

Answer 19

In Dubliners, marriage is seen as a ‘much more elevated state of ownership’

Question 20

Jeri Johnson

on Eveline

gender

Answer 20

‘a nuanced depiction of one steeped in competing codes of femininity…dutiful daughter, battered woman, (failed) romantic heroine’

Question 21

Margaret Church

gender

Answer 21

The failure of Dubliners ‘lies in the inability of modern man to assume fatherhood, either in image or in person’

Question 22

Theo Q. Dombroski

character

Answer 22

‘the nature of a character’s relationship with his family often reflects the nature of his spiritual failure’

Question 23

Seamus Deane

on james joyce

ireland

Answer 23

‘Wherever he looked, in Irish political or literary history, he found there the master-theme was betrayal’

Question 24

Seamus Deane

on Joyce’s relationship with Ireland

ireland

Answer 24

Joyce was ‘formed by the Ireland he repudiated’

Question 25

Katherine Mullin | on Eveline and anti-emigration propaganda ## Footnote ireland

Answer 25

Eveline ‘masquerades as a simple anti-emigration propagandist fiction’, like much of what was published in The Irish Homestead in which Eveline was first published, but it actually ‘interrogates the terms and functions of the nationalist propaganda it supposedly embodies’

Question 26

Garry Leonard | on anti-emigration stories ## Footnote ireland

Answer 26

Joyce ‘works within the formula of the anti-emigration story and uses it to show that people stay where they are in Dublin not because they discover the wisdom of doing so but because they are trapped’

Question 27

Stephen Hero | incomplete james joyce novel ## Footnote religion

Answer 27

Literature should be free from ‘missionary intention’ - links to Gabriel’s idea that ‘Literature was above politics’ and to the idea that Joyce leaves gaps in his stories perhaps for the reader to draw their own conclusions, rather than Joyce giving them all the answers

Question 28

Frank O’Connor | on the ordering of the stories ## Footnote structure

Answer 28

First few stories are ‘sketches’ Middle = ‘very harsh naturalistic stories about Dublin middle class life’ Final stories are stylistic and symbolic representations of a complex reality

Question 29

Peter Costello | on the ordering of the stories ## Footnote structure

Answer 29

Argued that the stories were arranged to represent the passage into experience and maturity

Question 30

Colin MacCabe | on the ordering of the stories ## Footnote structure

Answer 30

Argued that there was no overriding order to the stories in Dubliners from which meaning could be derived – instead he saw them as hybrid narratives

Question 31

William V. Davis | on the changes in narrative perspective ## Footnote structure, paralysis

Answer 31

Argues that the more expansive and less singular points of view in the later stories reflect the reduction of paralysis

Question 32

Garry Leonard | on structure of the stories ## Footnote structure

Answer 32

‘they begin in the middle of something and stop unexpectedly with what may or may not be a new beginning’ ‘they stop without appearing to have ended’

Question 33

Garry Leonard | on Joyce’s detail/realism/naturalism ## Footnote dramatic methods

Answer 33

‘never before has a writer used so much detail to explain so little’ ‘the ordinary is elevated to the level of the epic’

Question 34

Garry Leonard | on Joyce’s choice of narrative perspective ## Footnote dramatic methods

Answer 34

‘Joyce refuses to be an omniscient narrator because the twentieth century is anything but an Age of Faith’

Question 35

Garry Leonard | on Joyce’s perspective in Clay ## Footnote dramatic methods

Answer 35

‘by constricting the scope of the narrative in exactly the same way Maria constricts her point of view, we are able to sympathise with Maria in this moment’ ‘every person in the room…works to preserve her delusions’

Question 36

Garry Leonard | on the silences of The Sisters ## Footnote dramatic method

Answer 36

‘it seemed more gaps than substance’

Question 37

Garry Leonard | on how the stories communicate significance ## Footnote dramatic methods

Answer 37

‘the stories communicate significance through what the characters know or wish to know, but also what they are unable to see or are afraid to feel’

Question 38

Garry Leonard | on Little Chandler’s use of fantasy (a little cloud) ## Footnote dramatic method

Answer 38

‘Like the narrator of Araby or Maria in Clay, Little Chandler uses almost constant fantasy to insulate himself from the reality of his life as he is living it’

Question 39

Joyce | intention

Answer 39

wanted to hold up a ‘nicely polished looking glass’ to the people in Dublin

Question 40

Joyce | on the title and paralysis ## Footnote intention

Answer 40

‘I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city’

Question 41

One of Joyce’s aims | intention

Answer 41

‘to write a chapter of the moral history of my country’

Question 42

Joyce | disgust at the over-romanticising of Ireland/religion ## Footnote religion and ireland

Answer 42

‘I am nauseated by their lying drivel about pure men and pure women and spiritual love forever: blatant lying in the face of truth’

Question 43

Wallace Gray | existentialism ## Footnote philosophy

Answer 43

“we live in a world that offers no meaning or purpose to existence, one in which we feel alienated from the self and others, in which there are no clear moral standards”

Question 44

Wallace Gray | free indirect discourse ## Footnote dramatic methods

Answer 44

“the character “infects” the prose style of the writer”

Question 45

Wallace Gray | effects of chiasmus ## Footnote dramatic methods

Answer 45

“Joyce achieves a number of effects through the extensive chiasmus … he provided the incantatory effect of the kind of intonations of chants one would hear in Church. The effect is also numbing”

Question 46

Wallace Gray | chiasmus/repetition to show paralysis ## Footnote paralysis

Answer 46

“the sense of a lack of forward movement, of a passage turning in on itself in repetitive images, the essence of paralysis”

Question 47

Herring | triteness ## Footnote repitiotion, paralysis

Answer 47

“Questing characters in Dubliners are frequently assaulted by something I call a “tyranny of triteness,”

Question 48

Herring | intentions ?

Answer 48

“the author need not fear censorship because libelous thoughts are in the reader’s mind, not in the text”

Question 49

Herring | paralysis

Answer 49

“centuries of political and religious oppression had caused a general paralysis of mind and will”

Question 50

Riquelme | dramatic methods

Answer 50

“Joyce can include the psychological within a physical description”

Question 51

Norris | on Clay's Maria ## Footnote character

Answer 51

“the “old maid”: a figure who seems to lack everything and therefore embodies total desire”

Question 52

Homi Bhabha | araby ## Footnote philosophy

Answer 52

“orientalism is…the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths”

Question 53

Vincent J Cheng | araby ## Footnote gender, philosophy

Answer 53

The adolescent male desire for a feminine Other