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Modernism & Joyce's Dubliners

The document discusses James Joyce and his collection of short stories titled Dubliners. It summarizes that Modernism rejected Victorian artistic standards and emphasized impressionism, subjectivity, fragmented forms, and the inner experiences of individuals over social realities. For Joyce, the key idea of Modernism as it related to Dublin was a sense of "paralysis" in Irish society. Dubliners is organized into sections representing childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life to depict the moral history and paralysis of Dublin under different life stages.

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123 views15 pages

Modernism & Joyce's Dubliners

The document discusses James Joyce and his collection of short stories titled Dubliners. It summarizes that Modernism rejected Victorian artistic standards and emphasized impressionism, subjectivity, fragmented forms, and the inner experiences of individuals over social realities. For Joyce, the key idea of Modernism as it related to Dublin was a sense of "paralysis" in Irish society. Dubliners is organized into sections representing childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life to depict the moral history and paralysis of Dublin under different life stages.

Uploaded by

clymenus
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

James Joyce

The Dubliners
Modernism

The movement in visual arts, music, literature,


and drama which rejected the old Victorian
standards of how art should be made and what
it should mean.
Modernism’s History
• Began with World War I and was marked by
the strenuousness of that war.
• Also was influenced by the boom of the 20s
and the economic depression of the 30s.
• World War II profoundly and negatively
marked modern thought
• 1965, the end of modernism—uncertainty
was giving away to anger and protest.
Modernism moves away from
• The apparent objectivity provided
by omniscient third-person
narrators and fixed narrative points
of view
• Clear-cut moral positions
• Middle class way of thinking—
marriage, nation, and money as the
ends of the good life.
Modernism emphasizes…
• Impressionism and subjectivity in
writing.
• A dense and unordered actuality as
opposed to the practical and
systematic.
• Self-consciousness of the artist—the
work calls attention to its own
status as art
Modernism emphasizes…
• Fragmented forms—Impressionism

• Discontinuous narratives

• Random-seeming collages of
different materials
Modernism emphasizes…
• The individual and the inner being over
the social human being
• The unconscious rather than the self-
conscious

(These ideas reflect the influence of Jung


and Freud. Instead of realistic depiction
of life in its statistical details, modernists
depict life as it is lived on the inside of
people’s heads.)
“Modern” implies a sense of
• Historical discontinuity

• Alienation

• Loss

• Despair
James Joyce

For Joyce, these ideas of discontinuity,


alienation, loss, and despair can be summed up
in one word, which is prevalent in Dubliners:

Paralysis
James Joyce
“My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of
my country, and I chose Dublin for the scene because that
city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to
present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects:
childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The
stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the
most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the
conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in
the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen
and heard.”

(from Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, New York, 1940, V-iv.)


Dubliners Themes

• Childhood
• Adolescence
• Maturity
• Public Life
Childhood

• “The Sisters”
• “An Encounter”
• “Araby”
Adolescence

• “Eveline”
• “After the Race”
• “Two Gallants”
• “The Boarding House”
Maturity

• “A Little Cloud”
• “Counterparts”
• “Clay”
• “A Painful Case”
Public Life

• “Ivy Day in the Committee


Room”
• “A Mother”
• “Grace”
• “The Dead

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