Search for Meaning in James Joyce's Dubliners

I think an understanding of this (self-subverting) form has some important and complicated implications for a reading of Absalom, Absalom!, especially in terms of the relationship of historicity to orality in the novel, and of its distinctive and relatively homogeneous prose style. Ultimately to be found in these themes are the novel's fantasies of its form and of its reader. The new aesthetic defines itself in relationship to an implied old one which, because of some historical break ("Then the theatre was changed/to something else"), no longer works. If Absalom, Absalom!, formally and thematically, offers a substitute for a now-inadequate "souvenir," it may be necessary to begin its exploration with the souvenir itself: namely the communication of positive historical truth in fixed form. Many critical interpretations of Absalom, Absalom!

Cambridge University Press. New York, New York: 1993. Garrett, Peter K., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Dubliners. Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 1968.

Atwood, taking a different approach, directly addresses the conventions of storytelling in her own story. Plot, character development, setting, and form are all addressed within “Happy Endings.” And by creating multiple versions each with their own ending, Atwood encourages readers to interact and assign meaning to the stories both separately and when strung together. Not only does "Happy Endings" create a story about fiction writing, it also makes that story interactive, which draws more attention to itself as a criticism of traditional fiction. Both "Happy Endings" and Foe provide commentary on gender issues in modern fiction writing. In "Happy Endings", Margaret Atwood’s attack on gender stereotypes reveals itself in the form of character interactions.

There is always semeiotic mediation, a contingent though not necessarily arbitrary process. The undermining of mimesis in language might be, Staten further argues, Joyce’s aesthetic intention. Perhaps Ulysses is the first novel to willfully undermine its mimetic composition, its own intentionality in attempting to mirror nature. It displays language as deconstructive of itself, ... ... middle of paper ... ...rcalated elements contingently link in series, composing, decomposing, recomposing. We have entered a thoroughly non-Platonic world in this passage of generalized simulacra.

Hans Walter Gabler et al. NY: Vintage, 1993. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage Books A Division of Random House, Inc, 1986.

Barth redefines this relationship as one of inherent, but not defined, meaning by entering into self-reflexivity and consciousness as the novel progresses. Barth furthers the deconstructive project by asserting LF’s fictionality to engage the reader in play, rather than a passive consumption of authorial intent. (Worthington) As Lost in the Funhouse is constitutive of many stories that are about the inability of traditional narrative meeting contemporary needs, “the old analogy between Author and God…can no longer be employed” (LF 125). The novel begs the question of what literature can do if the medium is “moribund..if not already dead.” (LF... ... middle of paper ... ...y of Autobiography in John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse." Studies in Short Fiction 34.2 (1997): 151.

Methodological Introduction New historicism is premised upon an ideological attempt to wed the practice of history and literary criticism. In this type of textual analysis, the literary work is juxtaposed with historical events (characteristic of the time period in which the work was produced) in an effort to understand the implications within the text. This line of inquiry serves to recover a "historical consciousness" which may be utilized in the rendering of literary theory. "Poems and novels came to be seen in isolation, as urnlike objects of precious beauty. The new historicists, whatever their differences and however defined, want us to see that even the most unlike poems are caught in a web of historical conditions, relationships, and influences.

Literature—the dictionary defines it being the art of written works that is designed to entertain, educate and instruct; writers use literature in an attempt to transfer their ideas from paper to the reader; for some, this task means bringing their story to a different place and time that is entirely separate from what the reader could perceive as ordinary, on order to serve the writer’s intent. With this the impossible, becomes the probable, and the worst fear possibly imagined becomes the breathed reality; with no stated separation between the living, and the dying. The word literature in itself cannot be accurately defined, and by attempting to do so limits, the word is instantaneously limited in its usage and effect. Literature just is, just as much as it is not. With literature, the characters in what we read, become our closest friends and our most feared enemies; we see ourselves within the characters and struggle to imagine if we would act in the same way as the characters, or if we would struggle to handle a situation differently.

These questions remain unanswered by the novel, and suggest the fluidity between the roles of author, reader and critic. The Typing Ghost and Caroline share the role of author within the narrative, and it is unclear which belongs in a more authoritative framing narrative due to the ambiguity of the novel’s end. Caroline also straddles the role of the reader, by listening to the narrative that the Typing Ghost recites, and takes on the role of the critic “by making exasperating remarks [that] continued to interfere with the book” (161). In this way, the roles of author, reader and critic are fulfilled by multiple characters, thus decentralising the authority and autonomy of each individual role. By decentralising the notion of authorship, Nicol suggests that Spark generates a complementary model of reading.

They contain collages of seemingly random and spontaneous content, but hold much deeper meaning. One of the most distinct and unique qualities of modernism and postmodernism is how they allow the genres to meld together, blurring the lines between prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Virginia Woolf's "An Unwritten Novel" is very distinctly a modernistic piece of literature. "An Unwritten Novel" is written in a manner that leaves the reader wondering if what he or she just read made any sense at all. "An Unwritten Novel" presents a sense of spontaneity and randomness, as if one is reading the thoughts of a person with attention deficit disorder.