Joyce, James - Mamta Chaudhry-Fryer (essay date summer 1995)
Mamta Chaudhry-Fryer (essay date summer 1995)
SOURCE: Chaudhry-Fryer, Mamta. “Power Play: Games in Joyce's Dubliners.” Studies in Short Fiction 32, no. 3 (summer 1995): 319-27.
[In the following essay, Chaudhry-Fryer examines the games played by children and adults in Dubliners.]
In one of Dubliners' most arresting observations, the boy in “Araby” says he has “hardly any patience with the serious work of life which seemed to me child's play” (26-27). Reading this stunning paradox in reverse offers a way of approaching the stories through Michel Foucault's theories about power and knowledge, as well as Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of comedy: embodying both subversion and inversion, child's play is the serious work of life.
Foucault argues in Power/Knowledge that the challenge to accepted truths comes through “the insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” admitting into the discourse what has been...
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