Critics Flashcards

Question

Declan Kiberd on Araby epiphany

Answer 1

‘sight has been replaced by insight or inner vision’ - because the ‘light was out’ when the boy has his moment of realisation (inversion of traditional light symbolism)

Answer 2

‘the most profound epiphanies of all occur not in the stories…but in us as we read them’

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

His epiphanies had originally aimed to ‘mock and expose the pretentions of others’, but they became ‘realisations of unconscious knowledge’

Answer 6

‘Marriage provides Mrs Kearney with economic stability, social respectability and two daughters’

Answer 7

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

Answer 8

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

Answer 9

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

Answer 10

Concludes that Joyce was neither a feminist nor a misogynist

Answer 11

‘the failure to marry he saw as a sign of moral paralysis’

Answer 12

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

Answer 13

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

Answer 14

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

Answer 15

‘When Gabriel’s desire for his wife is interrupted by her memories of a dead lover, his objectification of her is shattered’

Answer 16

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

Answer 17

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

Answer 18

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

Answer 19

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

Answer 20

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

Answer 21

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

Answer 22

‘a place of copied and derived gestures, whose denizens were turned outward to serve a distant source of authority in London’

Answer 23

Dublin is ‘above all an enclave of the British Empire, a colonial serf’

Answer 24

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’

Answer 25

‘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’

Answer 26

Joyce was ‘formed by the Ireland he repudiated’

Answer 27

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’

Answer 28

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’

Answer 29

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

Answer 30

‘Gabriel, facing reality at last, goes westward to encounter life and death’

Answer 31

Gabriel goes ‘to the place where life had been lived simply and passionately’

Answer 32

Gabriel’s ‘swooning surrender’ is not ‘a vision of reconciliation’

Answer 33

‘Isolated by education, temperament and egotism, Conroy is defeated…by his ultimate awareness of his inadequacy as a man’

Answer 34

‘Gabriel may see mystical union with all humanity as the only possible escape from the real humiliation of Dublin life’

Answer 35

‘The death signified in Joyce’s story by the dissolving of self’ is ‘intensified by the use of free indirect discourse’

Answer 36

‘he had written The Dead in a mood of reconciliation and affection’

Answer 37

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

Answer 38

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

Answer 39

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

Answer 40

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

Answer 41

‘they stop without appearing to have ended’

Answer 42

‘they begin in the middle of something and stop unexpectedly with what may or may not be a new beginning’

Answer 43

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

Answer 44

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

Answer 45

‘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’

Answer 46

‘it seemed more gaps than substance’

Answer 47

‘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’

Answer 48

‘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’

Answer 49

Gabriel is a ‘more sophisticated Maria’ - deluded self-identity

Answer 50

‘nicely polished looking glass’

Answer 51

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

Answer 52

‘Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.’

Answer 53

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’

Answer 54

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

Answer 55

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

Answer 56

‘It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories’

Answer 57

‘retard the course of civilisation in Ireland’

Answer 58

‘Conquered Ireland as a disgraced ruined maid’