What characteristics of modernism are evident in James Joyce's Dubliners?

James Joyce's Dubliners follows the thematic concerns of Modernist literature as summarized by the sociologist Georg Simmel:

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

T. S. Eliot further described Modernism in his discussion of Joyce's Ulysses

... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.

Certainly, in his Dubliners, Joyce diagnoses the human misery of the Irish who live in the capital city.  In addition, he identifies the source of much of this condition as that Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency which served as the bulwark of British power in the land.  With these social forces, Joyce portrays the tragic Irish paralysis which prevents his characters from breaking their stultifying conditions.

Providing the reader insights into the individuals of his work, Joyce employs the distinctive Modernist technique of stream-of-consciousness or internal monologues, at least.  The daily life of the individual residents of Dublin is paramount to the vision of life and the spiritual condition of the Irish as a whole.  As Terence Brown of Trinity College has written,

It was, Joyce believed, the artist's duty to expedite that uttering forth, that manifestation, through his placing of such epiphanic moments in a context that allowed the reader to discern their possible significance. ...some of Dubliners' Dubliners achieve comedic fictional apotheosis and occupy a text where variegated perspective and a mythic method would bring to full term the embryonic Modernism of the precociously experimental and achieved book.

How does Dubliners exemplify modernist literature?

Though not as obviously modernist as Joyce's other great prose works like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Dubliners nonetheless contains certain modernist elements. For one thing, all the stories in their own individual way attempt to challenge opinions about the nature of everyday life, which is one of the main features of literary modernism. Joyce peels back the outer later of Dublin life to reveal the beating heart within. And in stories such as "Two Gallants", which deals with a particularly unpleasant case of female exploitation, the heart of Dublin is revealed as having some pretty dark places.

Joyce's use of the stream-of-consciousness technique is a further example of modernism at work. Stream-of-consciousness is a narrative mode which gives us privileged access into the flow of consciousness as it passes through the minds of certain characters to better understand their fears, desires, and motivations. Another renowned modernist author, Virginia Woolf, made extensive use of this technique in her most famous work, Mrs. Dalloway.

Joyce uses it in "The Dead", generally considered to be the best story in the Dubliners collection. We see it when Gabriel Conroy tries to process the story of Michael Furey, his wife Gretta's long dead lover. As he looks about the bedroom he shares with Gretta, Gabriel feels the euphoria he'd experienced earlier in the evening drain away. He wonders where this feeling of joy came from, as his dinner host Aunt Julia will eventually be dead herself, just like her brother Pat Morkan.