Dubliners in James Joyce Reading Group

Mar 07, 2019 Big Hard Books & Classics rated it it was amazing

#Dubliners2019

https://youtu.be/GBj6erqxbqY ...more

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Mar 13, 2018 Anthony rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: all-things-joyce, transfer, ireland-challenge

I'm finally revisiting Joyce after over a thirty year drought. Strangely enough, there are passages in Dubliners (and also A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) that made an impact on me then and I still remember to this day. Growing up in Catholic Ireland in the 70's and 80's gave me a real perspective of Joyce's themes, albeit three quarters of a century later.

Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories set at the turn of the 20th century, at a time when Ireland was still a backward Brit ...more

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Jan 23, 2017 Biblio Curious rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics-western

Joyce only jostles active readers. He jerks around lazy readers :)

A couple stories were easy to get into, I was more active when reading them. They are fused into my soul and I just know one of them will deepen my 1st reading of Anna Karenina. I just know it will!!

I 'get' Joyce, maybe. He's a brilliant writer who runs an invisible thread through his stories and maybe into other stories as well. And why not run that thread into various parts of what makes us human? Dubliners is my 1st attempt at ...more

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Dec 04, 2016 alex rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: modernism

Is the will to change enough? This is the central question of Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of short stories that maps the heart of the author's native home. Here are fifteen glimpses of the private lives of unremarkable people, stuck in spiritual status, yearning for rebirth. Some have souls that are willing but their flesh is weak, others are struck with terror at the prospect of a new life, and most give in to the comfort of reliable disappointment. After 14 episodes of bleakness, this coll ...more

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Sep 16, 2017 Dominic Jericho rated it it was amazing

This wasn’t on my list originally but then I happened on YouTube a clip of the beautiful song The Lass of Aughrim and it reminded me how much I love that moment in The Dead, and in the excellent Nora.

I first read Dubliners as extra curricular reading in prep for uni interviews, and then again on a trip to Dublin with my father, and then again in my first year, where I discovered just how meticulously each story has been planned. Joyce used heavenly virtues and the seven deadly sins to work throu This wasn’t on my list originally but then I happened on YouTube a clip of the beautiful song The Lass of Aughrim and it reminded me how much I love that moment in The Dead, and in the excellent Nora.

I first read Dubliners as extra curricular reading in prep for uni interviews, and then again on a trip to Dublin with my father, and then again in my first year, where I discovered just how meticulously each story has been planned. Joyce used heavenly virtues and the seven deadly sins to work through each story. Nothing is random.

Reading the collection out of context, in an A-level study room I grappled with Joyce’s motifs – the iron railings in each of the stories surely meant to indicate the city was a prison, and imaginative addition. Then, on visiting the city I saw how iron railings covered much of the Georgian architecture. Joyce, being what he is, surely utilised the metaphor but it reminded me never to forget literature’s connections with place and reality. We can create an interpretation or reading in our heads but the author must have got it from somewhere, most often real life. Pilgrimages can yield revelations.

In Dubliners Joyce tries to get to the inner psyche of ordinary people who live in his hometown. The tone is set at the beginning. The Sisters opens the collection, the narrator contemplating the main theme of the stories: ‘Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.’ In Eveline ‘she set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal.’

Joyce believed the Irish were trapped. Trapped by religion, trapped by language, trapped by history, trapped by antiquated notions of nationhood. These stories tell the paralysing habits of all those who live in Ireland’s capital. In The Dead, the longest in the collection, Joyce offers Gabriel a hope of redemption when he realises and empathises with his wife’s lost love, Michael. Gretta sits between two angels. It is Gabriel’s epiphany at the close that shows the gentle humanity in Joyce’s first masterpiece:

‘Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love…His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’

Follow me on Twitter @JerichoDominic ...more

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