Notes
Notes Introduction . Tanja Vesala-Varttala gives such a comprehensive summary and thoughtful critique of Dubliners scholarship that I felt to do so in my own introduction would be simply redundant. I would therefore refer readers to the conclusion of Sympathy and Joyce’s “Dubliners”: Ethical Probing of Reading, Narrative, and Textuality, –. . James Buzard offers an “anthropological” exploration of early Dubliners criticism in his essay “ ‘Culture’ and the Critics of Dubliners.” . See Morris Beja’s “One Good Look at Themselves: Epiphanies in Dubliners”(–). . Robert Scholes points out the texts used in an illustrative way by his theorists: Todorov used Boccaccio’s Decameron, Genette used Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and Barthes, of course, used Balzac’s Sarrasine (–). . Patrick McCarthy focuses the exemplarity of Dubliners more specifically on its role within the genre of the short story. He writes, “As a contribution to the art of the short story, Dubliners is noteworthy for several reasons. Its sparse yet economical style, its use of suggestive details that at times seem to have a symbolic meaning, its refusal of any sort of neat conclusion have all influenced the shape of the modern short story” (). . I am here thinking particularly of some of the excellent discussions of Dubliners found in such studies as Vincent Cheng’s Joyce, Race, and Empire, the essays contained in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes’s Semicolonial Joyce, and James Fairhall’s chapter on “The Paralyzed City” in James Joyce and the Question of History, among others. . Hugh Kenner argues the obverse of this method of reading in his essay, “Signs on a White Field.” He writes, “I shall also hint at a corollary, that once we have at last really read Dubliners we shall find Finnegans Wake a great deal less strange” (). . Ansgar F. Nünning’s essay, “Reconceptualizing the Theory and Generic Scope of Unreliable Narration,” gives an excellent summary of earlier theories of unreliable narration , followed by a proposal for a more cognitive model, one that recognizes the role of “the conceptual models or frames previously existing in the mind of the reader or the critic” (). . In her intriguing discussion about the difficulties of translating Eliza’s “rheumatic wheels” into other languages, Jolanta Wawrzycka proposes another possibility, that Eliza’s malapropism may betray that she suffers from rheumatic fever (). . Vincent Cheng reports in Joyce, Race, and Empire on the first airing of his postcolonial reading of “The Dead.” “To my surprise, I learned from the controversial response to this paper more about the nature of the risks one takes in trying to repoliticize a highly canonical work. . . .‘Very interesting and imaginative, but I’m afraid you are doing serious violence to the story’ was the vexed response of one very senior scholar, whose work I admire very much” (). Chapter . The Gnomon of the Book: “The Sisters” . Carle Bonafous-Murat discusses the complexities of voluntary and involuntary memory in relation to place in both “The Sisters” and “Eveline” (–). . Wolfgang Karrer also configures the sisters into a gnomonic relationship with their brother, Father Flynn (–). . John Paul Riquelme gives a narratological explanation for why the reader might feel incriminated in the narrative ambiguity and unease:“Like the psycho-narration in A Portrait, the consonant self-narration in ‘The Sisters,’ combined with brief direct presentations of the character’s thoughts, creates a sense of intimacy between reader and character” (). . See Laurent Milesi’s essay, “Joyce’s Anamorphic Mirror in ‘The Sisters’,” for a beautifully theorized discussion of the inflections of vision in the dream, and in other key moments of the story (–). . Edward Brandabur interestingly gives a chiefly psychological and moral twist to the priest’s putative “perversity”—“The priest derives pleasure from a relationship in which he can inflict the double pain of his revolting presence and his Jansenistic doctrine , for both of these exercise on the boy so mysteriously strong an attraction that he feels compelled to look on the loathsome work of physical and spiritual paralysis in spite of (or perhaps because of ) his great fear” (). . William Johnsen finds a series of fascinating parallels between “The Sisters” and another story that appeared in The Irish Homestead in —Berkeley Campbell’s “The Old Watchman.” In this story a boy also encounters an old, disappointed man who, before dying, tells how he squandered his opportunities and ended up with a wasted life (–). . Hugh Kenner offers one of the more ingenious and compelling of the typological readings of the sisters in “The Sisters.” Noting that the configuration of an active...
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