Critics Flashcards
Mr Casey
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man- James Joyce
religion
‘No God for Ireland!…We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!’
Trevor L. Williams
religion
‘there is not a single priest who is not somehow morally and intellectually compromised’
Trevor L. Williams
Joyce’s exile
‘Joyce’s self-imposed exile from Dublin was precisely a flight from the ‘net’ of church-state ideology’
Trevor L. Williams
essay intro/conclusion
‘Dubliners is a gallery of human wrecks’
Professor Walz
walking dead
‘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’
Trevor L. Williams
paralysis
‘Above all, there is paralysis: linguistic, sexual, alcoholic, marital, financial; even history itself seems to have stopped’
Lyons
alcohol
‘The most prevalent disease in Dubliners is alcoholism’
Kane
Grace, Ivy Day, counterparts
alcohol
Gratification from alcohol is ‘illusory, temporary and destructive’
David Lloyd
alcohol
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’
Richard Ellman
on epiphanies
epiphany
‘Joyce’s discovery…was that the ordinary is the extraordinary’
Declan Kiberd
on Araby epiphany
epiphany
“sight has been replaced by insight or inner vision”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)
Garry Leonard
epiphany
Joyce ‘privileges the notion of an “epiphany” as the primary aesthetic building block of his stories’
Garry Leonard
epiphany
‘The Joycean epiphany does not so much confirm a truth as disrupt what one had grown comfortable accepting as true’
M. Pilar Sanchez Calle
gender
‘Although the portrayal of women is complex, a masculine point of view prevails throughout this work’
Suzette Henke
on Mrs Kearney’s victimisation
gender
She is a ‘victim of her greed and frustration’ but also of a ‘male dominated power structure of bourgeoisie impresarios who control Dublin culture’
Erica Gregory
gender
‘Joyce strives to provide a female perspective of marriage that is often lacking in the male-dominated Ireland’
Trevor L. Williams
joyces delay of marriage
religion
Marriage was a ‘legal apparatus embodying for him both state power and religious oppression’ - refused to marry Nora for 27 years
Shelia C. Conboy
gender
‘Dubliners shows the female body objectified and mystified by the male gaze’
Trevor L. Williams
gender and religion ?
In Dubliners, marriage is seen as a ‘much more elevated state of ownership’
Jeri Johnson
on Eveline
gender
‘a nuanced depiction of one steeped in competing codes of femininity…dutiful daughter, battered woman, (failed) romantic heroine’
Margaret Church
gender
The failure of Dubliners ‘lies in the inability of modern man to assume fatherhood, either in image or in person’
Theo Q. Dombroski
character
‘the nature of a character’s relationship with his family often reflects the nature of his spiritual failure’
Seamus Deane
on james joyce
ireland
‘Wherever he looked, in Irish political or literary history, he found there the master-theme was betrayal’
Seamus Deane
on Joyce’s relationship with Ireland
ireland
Joyce was ‘formed by the Ireland he repudiated’
Katherine Mullin
on Eveline and anti-emigration propaganda
ireland
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’
Garry Leonard
on anti-emigration stories
ireland
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’
Stephen Hero
incomplete james joyce novel
religion
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
Frank O’Connor
on the ordering of the stories
structure
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
Peter Costello
on the ordering of the stories
structure
Argued that the stories were arranged to represent the passage into experience and maturity
Colin MacCabe
on the ordering of the stories
structure
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
William V. Davis
on the changes in narrative perspective
structure, paralysis
Argues that the more expansive and less singular points of view in the later stories reflect the reduction of paralysis
Garry Leonard
on structure of the stories
structure
‘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’
Garry Leonard
on Joyce’s detail/realism/naturalism
dramatic methods
‘never before has a writer used so much detail to explain so little’
‘the ordinary is elevated to the level of the epic’
Garry Leonard
on Joyce’s choice of narrative perspective
dramatic methods
‘Joyce refuses to be an omniscient narrator because the twentieth century is anything but an Age of Faith’
Garry Leonard
on Joyce’s perspective in Clay
dramatic methods
‘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’
Garry Leonard
on the silences of The Sisters
dramatic method
‘it seemed more gaps than substance’
Garry Leonard
on how the stories communicate significance
dramatic methods
‘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’
Garry Leonard
on Little Chandler’s use of fantasy (a little cloud)
dramatic method
‘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’
Joyce
intention
wanted to hold up a ‘nicely polished looking glass’ to the people in Dublin
Joyce
on the title and paralysis
intention
‘I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city’
One of Joyce’s aims
intention
‘to write a chapter of the moral history of my country’
Joyce
disgust at the over-romanticising of Ireland/religion
religion and ireland
‘I am nauseated by their lying drivel about pure men and pure women and spiritual love forever: blatant lying in the face of truth’
Wallace Gray
existentialism
philosophy
“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”
Wallace Gray
free indirect discourse
dramatic methods
“the character “infects” the prose style of the writer”
Wallace Gray
effects of chiasmus
dramatic methods
“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”
Wallace Gray
chiasmus/repetition to show paralysis
paralysis
“the sense of a lack of forward movement, of a passage turning in on itself in repetitive images, the essence of paralysis”
Herring
triteness
repitiotion, paralysis
“Questing characters in Dubliners are frequently assaulted by something I call a “tyranny of triteness,”
Herring
intentions ?
“the author need not fear censorship because libelous thoughts are in the reader’s mind, not in the text”
Herring
paralysis
“centuries of political and religious oppression had caused a general paralysis of mind and will”
Riquelme
dramatic methods
“Joyce can include the psychological within a physical description”
Norris
on Clay’s Maria
character
“the “old maid”: a figure who seems to lack everything and therefore embodies total desire”
Homi Bhabha
araby
philosophy
“orientalism is…the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths”
Vincent J Cheng
araby
gender, philosophy
The adolescent male desire for a feminine Other
