James Joyce’s Dubliners – a discussion group (new)
THY Wednesdays 1015-1215 weekly from 3rd May
Tutor/Convener: Arnold Goldman
Please note that the 24th May session will be in the Town Hall Council
Chamber
James Joyce wrote fourteen of the fifteen short stories in Dubliners, his
first book of fiction, between 1904 and 1906. He was between 22 and 24
years old. He wrote the fifteenth, “The Dead”, when he was 25.
Dubliners wasn’t, however, published until 1914, in London, because of
printers’ and publishers’ fears of prosecution. (There were no
prosecutions.) All the stories are set in Dublin, the characters being of a
range of social types and classes. Joyce left Ireland in 1904, versions of
three of the stories having been published in Dublin magazines, and he
wrote the rest in Pula and Trieste - then part of the Austro-Hungarian
empire – where he taught English in the Berlitz school. Joyce once
characterised their style as “scrupulous meanness”. The final story, “The
Dead”, is a world classic, of which there are film and dramatic versions.
We’ll discuss each of the stories for an hour or perhaps two, and they’ll
be supplemented by relevant excerpts from Joyce’s contemporaneous
essays, reviews, lyric and satirical poetry and “epiphanies”.
There are many paperback editions of Dubliners. The Penguin Classics
edition edited with an introduction by Terence Brown and the Oxford
World Classics editions are recommended. Both have helpful notes.
There will be a course webpage at
www.cowbeech.force9.co.uk/readingdubliners.htm.
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