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Dubliners Proposal
The Need for a New Critical Edition of James Joyce's Dubliners
Despite enormous volumes of criticism and scholarship, James Joyce remains one of the most enigmatic writers of the twentieth century. His books have caused great controversy in both the literary and political worlds, as scholars and officials alike attempt to come to an understanding of is true intents and meanings. As with any great writer and/or works of literature, such attempts and the resultant debates will never cease; there is no single correct interpretation or understanding of Joyce's works, just as there is no way to come to a full and complete understanding of the author himself. This is precisely what makes literature both exciting and enduring -- it remains alive throughout the ages, no matter how much time has passed between the act of the literature's creation and a reader's discovery of the text. Each individual interpretation brings something new to the work, and these continual additions and emendations create a dynamic and essentially indefinable sense of meaning.
This does not mean, however, that scholarly and critical works that attempt to more rigidly define meaning are without value. On the contrary, despite the inherent incompleteness of specific critical interpretations, they...
It is through continued reinterpretation and reexamination that the mutability of literature is brought to light, and it is in such pursuits and the mutability they make apparent that the true value of a literary work -- and of the society and individual that produced that work, as well as the value of the society and individual that produced a certain understanding and interpretation of the work -- can be found. With an author and text as enigmatic as Joyce and his Dubliners, this is all the more true.
The last critical edition of Joyce's Dubliners was published in 1996 under the Viking imprint, edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. The collection of short stories was originally published in 1914, and thus a thirteen-years gap in a collection of critical scholarship might not seem overly long for a book that has been in print for nearly a century. Certainly, the criticism collected in the Viking Critical Library edition remains highly relevant, and represented the most recent available scholarship on the subject at the time of the book's publication. It is also true that no new groundbreaking discoveries concerning Joyce's life and biography or his writing of the stories in Dubliners have been made in the past thirteen…
There have been, however, many new interpretations of both Joyce's life and his works that warrant the publication of a new critical edition of Dubliners. Criticism continues to breathe new life into these stories, and a new edition compiling the past thirteen years' worth of scholarship would be useful to long-time fans of Joyce, new discoverers of his work, and the many students and educators in the academic world who engage in scholarly examinations of his work. Michael Begnal's book Joyce and the City examines the importance of place in Joyce's work, and this certainly has a profound effect on the stories in Dubliners; other scholarship places Joyce and his works more firmly in the canon of colonial and anti-colonial Irish writers than did previous scholarship available at the time the 1996 edition was being collated (McDermott; Powell; Valente; Staley).
Other recent scholarship has focused more explicitly on Dubliners than on Joyce as an author, with some very important new twists on the typical understandings of these stories. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's "Dubliners" by Margot Norris, Sympathy and Joyce's 'Dubliners': Ethical Probing of Reading, Narrative, and Textuality by Tanja Vesala-Varttala, and Rejoycing: New Readings of "Dubliners" by Harold F. Mosher, Jr.; Rosa M. Bollettieri Bosinelli are all recent books dedicated to critical examinations of these works, but they do not provide comprehensive criticism along with the text of Dubliners itself. This is the ultimate goal of a critical edition of any works; it is not merely to provide new scholarly and critical commentary, but to do so in a manner that is at once engaging and elucidating for any reader, scholarly or otherwise, of James Joyce's works.
The works of scholarship and criticism mentioned here are only a representative sample of the amount of new material written about Joyce and his Dubliners since the 1996 Viking edition of the stories was published, but they in and of themselves still warrant the creation and publication of a new edition. The creation of new criticism is only one part of keeping Joyce alive in the minds and hearts of readers, both in academia and in the wider world. It is also necessary for this new criticism to be accurately and meaningfully compiled and disseminated in a manner at once approachable and challenging to readers. The publication of a new critical edition of James Joyce's Dubliners will accomplish just that.
Joyce's Ulysses Claude Rawson is best known as a scholar of Jonathan Swift and the eighteenth century, but Rawson's has also used the savage irony of Swift's modest proposal for a series of essays which consider Swift's invocation of cannibalism in light of a longer tradition (in Anglo-Irish relations) of imputing cannibalism literally to the native Irish as a way of demonizing their "savagery" or else to implying a metaphorical cannibalism
Modernism, and how the literature that is considered to be Modernist literature is representative of the period. Then explain how contemporary world literature comes from Modernism Discuss three Modernists and their work. Then discuss two contemporary authors. Explain how they represent NOW (or the contemporary world which is from 1968 on.) Then discuss the differences between Modernism and contemporary literature. James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and DH Lawrence are three examples of three different