Critics Flashcards
Mr Casey on God
‘No God for Ireland!…We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!’
William V. Davis on faith
‘By the end of Dubliners, religious faith has been replaced by an aesthetic faith’
William V. Davis on changing representation of religion
‘Dubliners can be seen as a religious progression”
Trevor L. Williams on priests
‘there is not a single priest who is not somehow morally and intellectually compromised’
Trevor L. Williams on Father Purdon in Grace
The priest in Grace ‘exercises an authority over his businessmen congregation virtually indistinguishable in its social effects from that of the civil administration’
Trevor L. Williams on Joyce’s exile
‘Joyce’s self-imposed exile from Dublin was precisely a flight from the ‘net’ of church-state ideology’
OUP on the whole collection
‘Each of the fifteen stories offers a glimpse of the lives of ordinary Dubliners…and collectively they paint the portrait of a nation’
Trevor L. Williams (general comment)
‘Dubliners is a gallery of human wrecks’
Joyce’s objective according to a 1914 review in the Anathaeum
To portray a ‘dirty and crawling world’
Carlo Cassola (1967) on Joyce’s focus
Joyce ‘insists upon aspects of life which were normally considered of no importance’
Trevor L. Williams on imprisonment
‘Totally unaware of the extent to which they are prisoners of a greater power exercised elsewhere’
William V. Davis on escape
‘Dubliners can be viewed as a progressive escape from Dublin’
Professor Walz on the end of The 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 on paralysis
‘Above all, there is paralysis: linguistic, sexual, alcoholic, marital, financial; even history itself seems to have stopped’
Julian B. Kaye on An Encounter
‘An Encounter is a symbolic history of the boy narrator’s rejection of the authority of father, church and state as perverted and degenerate’
Clarice Short on Little Chandler and paralysis
Little Chandler is the only character who identifies his own paralysis and oppression
Lyons on alcohol
‘The most prevalent disease in Dubliners is alcoholism’
Fairhall on alcohol
The collection reveals a ‘sharp awareness of the social damage caused by drinking’
Kane on alcohol
Gratification from alcohol is ‘illusory, temporary and destructive’
David Lloyd on 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’
Ulysses - about pubs
‘Good Puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub’
Florence Walzl on epiphanies
‘There is a contrast between the apparent triviality of outward events and the importance of inner meaning’
Richard Ellman on epiphanies
‘Joyce’s discovery…was that the ordinary is the extraordinary’
Epiphanies defined in Stephen Hero
A ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’ which derives from a ‘vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself’
Declan Kiberd on Araby 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 on the readers’ own epiphany
‘the most profound epiphanies of all occur not in the stories…but in us as we read them’
Garry Leonard on the aestheticism of the epiphany
Joyce ‘privileges the notion of an “epiphany” as the primary aesthetic building block of his stories’
Garry Leonard on the epiphany as a convergence of the ideas already explored by the story
‘The Joycean epiphany does not so much confirm a truth as disrupt what one had grown comfortable accepting as true’
Vicki Mahaffey explaining Stanislaus Joyce’s view of Joyce’s epiphanies
His epiphanies had originally aimed to ‘mock and expose the pretentions of others’, but they became ‘realisations of unconscious knowledge’
M. Pilar Sanchez Calle on Mrs Kearney and marriage
‘Marriage provides Mrs Kearney with economic stability, social respectability and two daughters’
M. Pilar Sanchez Calle on gendered points of view
‘Although the portrayal of women is complex, a masculine point of view prevails throughout this work’
Suzette Henke on Mrs Kearney’s victimisation
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 on gendered points of view
‘Joyce strives to provide a female perspective of marriage that is often lacking in the male-dominated Ireland’
Bonnie Kime Scott in her book ‘Joyce and Feminism’
Concludes that Joyce was neither a feminist nor a misogynist
Theo Q. Dombroski on the failure to marry
‘the failure to marry he saw as a sign of moral paralysis’
Trevor L. Williams on Joyce’s refusal to marry
Marriage was a ‘legal apparatus embodying for him both state power and religious oppression’ - refused to marry Nora for 27 years
Marlena G. Corcoran on the Gabriel/Gretta power balance
Discusses how Gabriel’s expectation of the power balance between him and Gretta is subverted - in the cab he imagines only his address to her and her actual response is far from the ‘fantasy’ he had constructed
Shelia C. Conboy on female objectification
‘Dubliners shows the female body objectified and mystified by the male gaze’
Sheila C. Conboy on Gabriel and Gretta
‘When Gabriel’s desire for his wife is interrupted by her memories of a dead lover, his objectification of her is shattered’
Trevor L. Williams on marriage
In Dubliners, marriage is seen as a ‘much more elevated state of ownership’
Trevor L. Williams on Lily
Lily is only defined by the men around her - she is the ‘caretaker’s daughter’ and then Gabriel assumes she will soon be somebody’s wife
Jeri Johnson on Eveline
‘a nuanced depiction of one steeped in competing codes of femininity…dutiful daughter, battered woman, (failed) romantic heroine’
Margaret Church on the family
The failure of Dubliners ‘lies in the inability of modern man to assume fatherhood, either in image or in person’
Theo Q. Dombroski on family
‘the nature of a character’s relationship with his family often reflects the nature of his spiritual failure’
Seamus Deane on betrayal in Irish history
‘Wherever he looked, in Irish political or literary history, he found there the master-theme was betrayal’
Declan Kiberd on colonial oppression
‘a place of copied and derived gestures, whose denizens were turned outward to serve a distant source of authority in London’
Trevor L. Williams on colonial oppression
Dublin is ‘above all an enclave of the British Empire, a colonial serf’
Trevor L. Williams on when British power made itself known
A colonial power is omnipresent, yet it only makes itself known occasionally, in ‘vice-regal cavalcades or in certain people’s dependence upon that power for employment’
Trevor L. Williams on the best stories which show colonial dependence
‘The conclusion of Araby, where ‘English accents’ predominate, and the following three stories – Eveline, After the Race and Two Gallants – all bring to the surface Ireland’s colonial dependence’
Seamus Deane on Joyce’s relationship with Ireland
Joyce was ‘formed by the Ireland he repudiated’
Katherine Mullin on Eveline and anti-emigration propaganda
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 Eveline and the anti-emigration story
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 - inclusion of political/religious comment in literature
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
William York Tindall on the ending of The Dead
‘Gabriel, facing reality at last, goes westward to encounter life and death’
Richard Ellman on the ending of The Dead
Gabriel goes ‘to the place where life had been lived simply and passionately’
Charles Peake on the ending of The Dead
Gabriel’s ‘swooning surrender’ is not ‘a vision of reconciliation’
Phillip Hanning on the ending of The Dead
‘Isolated by education, temperament and egotism, Conroy is defeated…by his ultimate awareness of his inadequacy as a man’
Vincent Pecora on the ending of The Dead
‘Gabriel may see mystical union with all humanity as the only possible escape from the real humiliation of Dublin life’
JP Riquelme on the ending of The Dead
‘The death signified in Joyce’s story by the dissolving of self’ is ‘intensified by the use of free indirect discourse’
Majorie Howes on Joyce’s mood writing The Dead
‘he had written The Dead in a mood of reconciliation and affection’
Frank O’Connor on the ordering of the stories
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
Argued that the stories were arranged to represent the passage into experience and maturity
Colin MacCabe on the ordering of the stories
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
Argues that the more expansive and less singular points of view in the later stories reflect the reduction of paralysis
Garry Leonard on how the stories conclude
‘they stop without appearing to have ended’
Garry Leonard on how the stories begin and conclude
‘they begin in the middle of something and stop unexpectedly with what may or may not be a new beginning’
Garry Leonard on Joyce’s detail/realism/naturalism
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘it seemed more gaps than substance’
Garry Leonard on how the stories communicate significance
‘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
‘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’
Garry Leonard comparing Gabriel and Maria
Gabriel is a ‘more sophisticated Maria’ - deluded self-identity
Joyce said that he wanted to hold what up to the people in Dublin
‘nicely polished looking glass’
Joyce on the title and paralysis
‘I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city’
Ulysses on escape
‘Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.’
Joyce on religion (letter to Nora in 1904)
He had made ‘secret war upon it when I was a student. . .’ but that now, at 22, he would ‘make open war upon it by what I write and say and do’
One of Joyce’s aims
‘to write a chapter of the moral history of my country’
Joyce’s disgust at the over-romanticising of 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’
Joyce’s response to criticisms at the grimness of his stories
‘It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories’
Joyce felt that if the Irish people did not read his book it would…
‘retard the course of civilisation in Ireland’
Day on Ireland as a maid
‘Conquered Ireland as a disgraced ruined maid’
