023) James Joyce's Dubliners
 

It took Joyce nine years to get Dubliners published, following battles with censors, timorous publishers and the burning of its first printings. What fueled the outrage? Joyce’s uncompromising depiction of his native Dublin not in a series of “tourist impressions” but as a “center of paralysis.” Offered as a “moral history” of the Irish, Dubliners transformed our notions of what the short story might express, beginning with sketches of baffled childhood and culminating in that great prose requiem, “The Dead.”

NOTE: You may read through the volume at your own pace but come to the first class prepared to discuss the stories from “The Sisters” to “Two Gallants.” Our third session will be devoted entirely to “The Dead.”