Suspicious Readings of Joyce's "Dubliners"

Margot Norris

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780812237399, 9780812237399
• eBook ISBN: 9780812202984
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Because the stories in James Joyce's Dubliners seem to function as models of fiction, they are able to stand in for fiction in general in their ability to make the operation of texts explicit and visible. Joyce's stories do this by provoking skepticism in the face of their storytelling. Their narrative unreliabilities—produced by strange gaps, omitted scenes, and misleading narrative prompts—arouse suspicion and oblige the reader to distrust how and why the story is told.As a result, one is prompted to look into what is concealed, omitted, or left unspoken, a quest that often produces interpretations in conflict with what the narrative surface suggests about characters and events. Margot Norris's strategy in her analysis of the stories in Dubliners is to refuse to take the narrative voice for granted and to assume that every authorial decision to include or exclude, or to represent in a particular way, may be read as motivated. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners examines the text for counterindictions and draws on the social context of the writing in order to offer readings from diverse theoretical perspectives. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners devotes a chapter to each of the fifteen stories in Dubliners and shows how each confronts the reader with an interpretive challenge and an intellectual adventure. Its readings of "An Encounter, " "Two Gallants, " "A Painful Case, " "A Mother, " "The Boarding House, " and "Grace" reconceive the stories in wholly novel ways—ways that reveal Joyce's writing to be even more brilliant, more exciting, and more seriously attuned to moral and political issues than we had thought.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Gnomon of the Book: “The Sisters”
• 2 A Walk on the Wild(e) Side: “An Encounter”
• 3 Blind Streets and Seeing Houses: “Araby”
• 4 The Perils of “Eveline”
• 5 Masculinity Games in “After the Race”
• 6 Gambling with Gambles in “Two Gallants”
• 7 Narrative Bread Pudding: “The Boarding House”
• 8 Men Under a Cloud in “A Little Cloud”
• 9 Farrington, the Scrivener, Revisited: “Counterparts”
• 10 Narration Under the Blindfold in “Clay”
• 11 Shocking the Reader in “A Painful Case”
• 12 Genres in Dispute: “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”
• 13 Critical Judgment and Gender Prejudice in “A Mother”
• 14 Setting Critical Accounts Aright in “Grace”
• 15 The Politics of Gender and Art in “The Dead”
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Acknowledgments