City Texts Flashcards
Dubliners
Notes from Introduction
Dublin had impressive architecture, 18th Century Wide Streets Commission made Dublin a perfect walker’s city. Georgian buildings unfashionable in this period, though.
However, Dublin here in state of decline, lacking industry- workers, then, had to work in building industry.
Dublin: 30% households were single rooms with up to six people living in them–> high infant mortality rate and death rate.
Dubliners shows ‘manifestations of personal and social paralysis’.
‘detail, incident and image combine to establish a vision of life in the capital which serves as a kind of metaphor for the spiritual condition of the Irish nation as a whole’.
Tales are about paralysis: ‘Evelyn frozen in immobility at the end of ‘Eveline’, Mr Duffy in silence and solitude halted under a tree at the end of ‘A Painful Case’, the snow-capped statues in ‘The Dead’’
Dublin as a ‘defeated, colonial city’
‘abuse, violence against a child, sexual exploitations and entrapment, casual political corruption, religious hypocrisy’.
Basic Stories
-Araby-
The narrator is trapped in his dull routine, where he idealises Mangan’s sister. After a long time, they speak and she asks him if he is going to Araby. The day of the bazaar, his Uncle comes home late, forgetting to give him money. His uncle returns at 9pm, and the boy goes to the Bazaar. . When he arrives he finds that it is all shutting up, and he is overwhelmed by his sense of disappointment, anger and vanity.
-A Little Cloud-
Little Chandler is meeting Gallaher, an old and exciting friend who no longer lives in Dublin, but London, a city that for Little Chandler presents a promising exoticness. Gallagher patronises him for not drinking, and never having left Ireland. LC invites him for dinner, and G declines as he is having a party. LC returns home, now questioning his home life after G’s suggestions about the boredom of a wife, and seductive beauty of rich Jewesses. Holding his child as he contemplates whether it is too late to go to London, the child begins to cry
-The Boarding House-
Mrs Mooney runs a boarding house, alongside her daughter Polly. Polly flirts with men, whom Mrs Mooney knows don’t want anything serious. When she finds out that Polly is involved with one of the boarders, Mr Doran. Mr Doran is distressed and can’t decide how to act- run or marry. Polly is hysterical, saying she will kill herself, whilst he thinks about how she is a bit common, and tempted him with her bathrobe. He speaks to Mrs Mooney. The story ends on an ambiguous note, as we suspect he is going to marry her.
Stagnation
Tales are about paralysis: ‘Evelyn frozen in immobility at the end of ‘Eveline’, Mr Duffy in silence and solitude halted under a tree at the end of ‘A Painful Case’, the snow-capped statues in ‘The Dead’’
In Araby- the stagnating routine of daily life is broken by the exotic allure of Araby
‘He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune’ - A Little Cloud
‘For the first time his soul revolted against the dull inelegance of Capel Street. There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin’. - A Little Cloud
‘It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything.’- A Little Cloud
Quotes about Poverty & Difficulty
‘ragged girls…ragged girls…ragged troop’ - An Encounter (poss ref. to students of church-run schools for city’s poor, usually orphans)
‘rough tribes from the cottages’- Araby
‘They stood or ran in the roadway or crawled up the steps before the gaping doors or squatted like mice upon the thresholds…He picked his way deftly through all that minute vermin-like life and under the shadow of the aunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roistered.’ - A Little Cloud (Mansions were often turned into tenements for the poorest in society. Also, this vision comes directly after his thoughts about poetry, showing a stark contrast between art and real life).
Mr Doran is forced to marry a girl just to retain his job, demonstrating economic pressures
crowd forms a ‘channel of poverty and inaction’ - After the Race’.
Psychogeography plan
‘Define and analyse the literary effects of …psycogeography’
Wiki definition: phsychogeorgraphy is “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities… just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.”
New articfical spaces change the urban landscape, allowing for changing interactions between people:
- Elizabeth on the bus in Mrs Dalloway
- Bloom and other in the Taxi Cab
- Pound ‘In A Station of The Metro’
- Of of these are instances of a new kind of exploration of the city which is human not natural and also close-packed and crowded.
Commodity culture gives imaginative springboard for alternative lives. Provokes hallucinations in Septimus smith, but the city gives him means to kill himself. City is almost like the figures whispering in his ears.
The crowd evokes mass psychogeorgaphy- mrs Dalloway they follow the car which gives them mass viewpoint of this royal car. Same with plane where they are conditioned to a consumerist viewpoint. Or is it just a linking device form one individual to another?
Psychogreography cannot always be positive- provokes claustrophobia and inescapability . Dubliners , Wasteland.
