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‘By the end of Dubliners, religious faith has been replaced by an aesthetic faith’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’