Hope, Hunger, and Spiritual Liberation in Joyce’s Dubliners

“Hope, Hunger, and Spiritual Liberation in Joyce’s Dubliners” challenges the consensus that Dubliners is best understood as an expression of paralysis or hopelessness. Seen through Ernst Bloch’s critical theory, hope emerges as a forward-looking process in Joyce’s stories, one wary of apotheosis and tied to historical conditions such as hunger. What emerges is a new way of regarding the political operation of Joyce’s texts as adaptive, anticipatory, and unfolding. While Joyce never underestimates the material and political resistances to hope posed by the poverty and hunger that his characters suffer under colonialism and capitalism—indeed, his texts invite readers to scrutinize these conditions—this essay shows that Dubliners, while not directed toward a specific political goal, is fundamentally open to what Bloch calls “real possibility,” or to social and political futures that are possible given prevailing and maturing material conditions but which cannot necessarily be named or known in advance.