Dubliners Group

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meddicted
meddicted
Student
Graduate School

Please can you help me with James Joyce's Dubliners style?

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Posted by meddicted on Wednesday January 7, 2009 at 11:30 AM and tagged with dubliners, joyce, style.

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  1. kc4u Teacher
    College - Senior

    eNotes Editor

    The Dubliners is still early Joyce and we are not yet in the complicated linguistic and stylistic world of A Portrait, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce's attitude to language and style is a very ambivalent one. Is he a proto-poststructuralist who contests the representational powers of language or as Beckett would see him, as someone who could do everything with language. Joyce had been aware of Fritz Mauthner's critique of language and followed an extremely complicated multi-tongued, punning and neologistic baroque style in his later works.

    In The Dubliners, his style is at a formative stage. It is still representational, realistic, full of meticulously verified real details of Ireland. There is no terseness or minimalism. The style is impressionistic, imagistic, thronged with lyricism, symbolic reference-scheme, evocatively poetical and does show anticipations of the "interior monologue" or 'stream of consciousness' style e.g. the end of The Dead where we have a partial interior monologue of Gabriel. This is not say, it is an easy work in any way. The vision and the content remain radically subtle and complex.

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    Posted by kc4u on Sunday November 1, 2009 at 2:58 AM