James Joyce A Critical Guide

Spinks, Lee

doi:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638352.001.0001

Cited by 8 publications

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“…Joyce critics have examined and scrutinized The Sisters in general and thematic ways (Benstock, 1966;Kennedy, 1975;Glasheen, 1977, Robinson, 1987, Albert, 1990, Leonard, 2004and Spinks, 2009). For example, Fritz Senn argues that "even in his earliest published prose Joyce wrote in a most complex, heavily allusive style, different from its later convoluted intricacies in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in degree only " (1965: 66).…”

Section: Like James Joyce Himself Stephen Dedalus In a Portrait Of Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

“It was that chalice he broke…”: James Joyce’s Dissatisfaction with Religion in His Short Story, The Sisters

Güneş¹

2013

TAKSAD

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This paper examines James Joyce's dissatisfaction and frustration with the established religion and the Catholic Church in this earliest short story The Sisters. In so doing, the paper focuses upon two strategies or two conditions used by Joyce in the story to represent his relentlessness with the church and the priesthood. One of them is his use of "pederasty" between the priest and young children, by which Joyce disgraces the image of the priesthood and the church. The second one is the "broken" image of the "chalice" as an important symbol. By means of these two strategies, Joyce not only deconstructs the trustworthy image of the church and the priesthood but also becomes able to create a free space outside the influence of the border of the church for his artistic vocation.

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Section: Like James Joyce Himself Stephen Dedalus In a Portrait Of Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

“It was that chalice he broke…”: James Joyce’s Dissatisfaction with Religion in His Short Story, The Sisters

Güneş¹

2013

TAKSAD

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“…Consequently, the absent words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even characters are rendered more significant than all those present. Lee Spinks (2009) would rather see this principle as "the "meanness" of Joyce"s narrative" (p. 50). Magalaner and Kain (1957) believe that "Joyce is a writer who must be heeded.…”

Section: Gnomons: Joyce's Mysterious Ambiguitymentioning

confidence: 99%

No Sisters, No Brother, No Man: “The Sisters” and Joyce’s Gnomonics

Keshavarz

Ghasemi

2012

kata

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Modern fiction has a certain way of achieving "literariness" and "sophistication"; it does so by means of "ambiguity". Being "witty" or "deceitful", to quote William Empson, ambiguity seems to press home the writers" intention of deferring the meaning by making the ontological status of the text as implicit as possible. Ambiguity, therefore, forms a kind of narrative that determines the writer"s style. In James Joyce, however, particularly in the stories of Dubliners, this ambiguity is meant to reach a "mysterious" level. Joyce"s "mysteries" are utterly different from commonly-believed, so-called textual "problems". The problems can be solved, but mysteries should be "witnessed" and "attested" to be unfolded. Joyce"s mysterious ambiguities bear his unique signature: they represent the complexity, significance, and survival of a "gnomonic" patterning. Being a geometric figure, a gnomon is the part of a parallelogram which remains after a similar parallelogram has been taken away from one of its corners. The gnomon, therefore, represents an incomplete figure, like Joyce"s vaguely elliptical and incomplete stories. Joyce introduces the gnomon as the personification of imperfection, hopeless, paralysis, and damnation. The following study is going to elaborate this main principle of Joycean ambiguity in the opening story of Dubliners, "The Sisters", and demonstrate its distinctively gnomonic narrative and characterization.

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“…Considerably, the absent words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even characters are rendered more significant than all those present. Lee Spinks (2009) would rather see this principle as "the 'meanness' of Joyce's narrative" (50). Kain (1957) believes that "Joyce is a writer who must be heeded.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

James Joyce’s “An Encounter”: From the Perversion of an Escape to the Perversion of the Fatherhood

Ghahreman

Pourgiv

2013

IJALEL

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Ambiguity is an indispensable part of modern fiction that has always implied what is always merited as the 'literariness' and 'sophistication' of that fiction. In modern fiction, particularly in James Joyce's Dubliners, ambiguity and indeterminacy transcend the textual difficulty and achieve a 'mysterious' level. That is to say, Joyce renders the frequent unfinished and elliptical sentences, as well as the absent words, phrases, paragraphs, and even characters more significant than all those present. In Dubliners, this unique concept of ambiguity and indeterminacy, that tends to be Joyce's narrative signature, is called "gnomonic"-a term derived from Euclid's gnomon. A gnomon is formed by removing a similar parallelogram from a corner of a larger parallelogram. Gnomons in Dubliners indicate not only the incompletion and failure, but also the dialectical cycle of presence and absence. Words prove mostly insufficient to convey meaning, and actions are subject to failure even before they start. But Joyce's approach to gnomon is not a passively confirming one. Joyce skillfully benefits the mysterious condition that his gnomonics make for sustaining his creativity in order to overwhelm intellectually the distorting powers in his society. Therefore, if Joyce's stories seem unsolvable and vague, it is not because of their merely textual difficulties. They present, instead, some gnomonic mysteries of varying degrees and depths. As a way to get readers to read Joyce thoughtfully, this study is going to shed light on this unique gnomonic nature of Joycean mysteries in "An Encounter", one of the childhood stories in Dubliners.

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James Joyce A Critical Guide

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

“It was that chalice he broke…”: James Joyce’s Dissatisfaction with Religion in His Short Story, The Sisters

“It was that chalice he broke…”: James Joyce’s Dissatisfaction with Religion in His Short Story, The Sisters

No Sisters, No Brother, No Man: “The Sisters” and Joyce’s Gnomonics

James Joyce’s “An Encounter”: From the Perversion of an Escape to the Perversion of the Fatherhood

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